By Marshall S. Blonsky
East 12th street, New York City. Natural floors, a temporary black sofa on them. Speakers are in the corner. There, an electric guitar, earphones, amplifier, keyboard. A fichus is another corner, looking sort of lonely. Boxes are everywhere, books in them: Webster's New World Dictionary, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, (another book covers it) by Jamaica Kincaid, Ulysses, Poetics of Aristotle, The Name of the Rose... A computer is on a designer card table. A toy King Kong is climbing kitsch Empire State Building. A telephone book is open to Mattresses. Umberto Eco, who can now legally bring money out of Italy, sits on the sofa in the two-bedroom apartment he has bought for his son, Stefano, and for himself, a pied à terre for his thrice-yearly visits to New York now that his fame prevents his former pedagogic life at New York University (often combined, in the 70s, with semesters at Yale). "Now I will have a room of my own instead of these impersonal, sterile $200-a-night hotel rooms," he's just said. "You know, New York is not an American city," he tells his visitor. "It's a European, Mediterranean city that just happens to be on the other side of the Atlantic."
Visitor: Dimmi. How do you want to start?
How do you think? Ab ovo. Or almost. I am not afraid to recount the source, the Ursprung. So. I was born in Alessandria, a city that now amounts to a little less than 100,000 inhabitants. But it was like that thirty years ago. It is like that now. It means it is not growing, very flat. There are beautiful hills around, but the city is flat. It was a city very important historically, because when Fredric Barbarossa, the German emperor, invaded Italy, the pope, Alexander the Third -- and many other free communes, because there were the free cities in Italy -- paid a lot of money to encourage people living in little boroughs to make up a new city to stop Fredrick Barbarossa. And that was Alessandra, from the name of the pope, Alexander. And they stopped Barbarossa. They did their job. And in exchange, they had a city. And after that, the city underwent many historical events, but nothing really important.
The main feature of the city is that for all the winter, is completely submerged in the fog. A fog in comparison with which London is Miami. And this fog, I think, was very important to me. To live in the fog means to elaborate an attitude of introspection and prudence. I like the fog. I like the fog even when I am driving in the fog on the highway, which is the most terrible thing that can happen to somebody, and everybody is terrified by driving in the fog, and me, too, I would prefer there was no fog. When driving in the fog, I feel comforted. Fog is a sort of maternal womb that wraps you. Maybe you have seen the Amacord of Fellini in which there is this scene of the old man in the fog that loses his own way. This is more south than my city but it seems there is enough fog. But fog is that. And it is not by chance that there is a whole chapter of The Name of the Rose that is set in the fog.
Another characteristic of my city was skepticism. It was built up in order to resist the emperor. They did it but they didn't elaborate any heroic myth about that. It happened, okay. it seems that once Saint Francis of Assisi passed through Alessandria and converted a wolf. Now all the story of Saint Francis of Assisi is centered about his conversion of the wolf in Cupio, central Italy. He converted a wolf also in Alessandria but everybody forgot. They had a rich Hebrew community during Middle Ages and Renaissance, but they didn't have really a ghetto. I don't say it's a virtue. They were not fanatic to conceive of a ghetto, so my city is a non-heroic city. There are are no heros -- my city taught me that there are no heros. And there is no need, not exactly to die for something, but in any case to kill other people for something.
I remember that the chief of the communist party, Togliatti, in 46 or 46 was shot by a fanatic. while he survived but in this oment theree was a very danger4ous moment in italy because all the workers all the comunist associationraised up. we were on the verge of a new civvl war, then everything was settled. but i remember in italy evrybody was on the central square protesting for the attempted assasination of togliatti and suddenly he saw an airplane passing with some publicity on its tail, and I looked at the airplane. I thought, 'How curious! You see, they are inventihg every day new things,' and they chatted a lot about that and then they went on.
Is a skeptical city in which everybody did their own job when it was necessary, but without exaggerating. Causaubon in the Pendulum. The city was famous in the world till a few years ago because the Borsalino hats were produced in Alessandria, so Alessandria was a worker's city. Always governed by Communists or socialists because the city works. Now, Borsalino has declined.
My father was an accountant in a small firm, they were selling iron, buying and selling iron. My father was the first child of thirteen children and the son of a typographer, typesetter. So it means a very low social status. My grandfather was, it seems, I didn't know him because he died when I was three or four (so I have some imprecise memories), he was a socialist as far as a socialist could exist at the time. And for instance he organized strikes. During the strikes there are the so-called crumiers, the scabs, those workers who are against the the strike. My grandfather was afraid that the crumiers would be beaten by the strikers, so he gave them to eat. And one night, my father went back to his home with children, thirteen children, and he saw this table with people who were eating what there was to eat. And these were the crumiers that my grandfather was saving from the strikers whom he organized. Paradox.
Vis.: And you in all this?
Me, it will be eventually. Senti. He, my grandfather, being a typographer, he had in his house many books, because in the free time he was binding books. And so my father when he was a boy read many books. Popular stories. Read many books. And this was an important element in my youth, because my father told me many stories about stories, and he gave me the taste for narrativity. Beyond this, my infancy was the most normal in the world.
Later, when I was already making the high school, studying philosophy, then my father told me, "Ah, philosophy is interesting, I never studied philosophy, obviously." My father made only the first schools and then he went to work. He was probably an intelligent person, a reader, but not a specially cultivated man. He said once, I remember, "There was here in Alessandria somebody giving a public lecture on Kant, and I don't know why, I went there and I had impression that the theory of Kant is okay with...we believe this is a ship because we call it a ship, but if we called it another way it wouldn't be a ship." Obviously my father mistook the Kantian philosophy, by which the experience is shaped on the ground of some mental structures and so on. And he mistook the fact of so-called Kantian transcendental principle with the fact that we are applying a word to things. But [laughs] if I consider that I devoted my life to the study between words and thoughts, and thoughts and reality, and the way in which our way to look at reality is determined by our words, probably this short report from my father...it influenced me. Now, from my scientific point of view, I could say that my father misunderstood a lecture on Kant and believed that Kant thought as Benjamin Lee Whorf. But in any way, it influenced probably my life.
My father, I told you, was an accountant, he was an employee. He knew I was a professor, an intellectual, but he never understood what I did to the day he died, but he died proud of me and I am happy of that. [Pauses] I just wish [pauses] he could have seen something of what happened...I mean,with the Rose.
Quiet in the room. King Kong slowly ascends the Empire State Building.
Let's tell another story. After the war...[interrupts himself]...so I belonged to that generation educated under fascism, the uniform, all that stuff. At the age of 11 since the bombing of the city was becoming pretty heavy, we went out into the countryside. What I tell about Jacopo Belbo and those stories are personal memories of that time. Before the war, I had started going to the so-calledOratorium, a Catholic group, and went back to it after --
Vis.: Stay with the war. I'd like an image of your mother in it, your father...
My mother... I was living my childhood during the war and in a moment in which food was not so easy to find. We were not poor yet it was impossible to find food. And I am preoccupied with the new generation who do not know what war is, who do not know what does it mean, starving during the war, starving with my mother crying because she couldn't have flour, could not find the farina with which to make... [his voice catching,]
A beat.
What is the difference between "flower" and "flour"?
Vis.: [astonished, utterly mute]
My mother cried because she failed to find ... yes, something to eat. And then the day after, she found marons, chestnuts. Flour. And so she made beautiful pie and we ate. And we were not poor. Now obviously I live in an affluent society, not only myself. I know others of my generation are very embarrassed when in a restaurant they bring, even in Europe, too much. I want to leave something on the plate. Because of my mother--
Vis.: Why at a certain moment you refuse during a meal--
-- who had to go into the woods to find marons One, a single one, is precious to us and so we cannot eat the whole plate. So. Before the war I had started going to the Oratorium, and after I resumed. And I belonged faithfully, strongly, dogamatically, passionately to this and the other Catholic organizations. And for me it meant a real commitment, chastity, the Holy Communion, possibly every day, studying Bible and the Gospels, organiizing people. I am unable to ski because when my schoolmates went on Saturday and Sunday to ski, I was there organizing younger people -- like right or wrong, my party -- taking part in an organization strongly, faithfully, 24 hours per day until the moment I was called during the university to be in the national office of the organizzation.. I was at the top of the organiation,meeting even the pope ,who who was at that time Pius XII. But we, this bunch of national leaders of the Catholic organization, started at the point to read two authors. One was Emanuel Munier, this personalist esprit which was a left-oriented Catholicism -- and Gramsci. And so at a certain point there was a confrontation between left wing of the Catholic organization and the oldest ones, who were more right wing. And so I left.
But in the meanwhile I was studying Medieval philosophy at the university and so this break that for many of my friends of that time was only a political break -- many of them became and remained Christian Democrat -- for me, coincided with a religious crisis. To explain how a religious crsiis can raise up is very difficult. It's not that you make a certain philosophical criticism of your ideas. It would be very strange that I got a religious crsisis while studying the Middle Ages theologians like Aquinas.
It's not enough, in order to explain why you lose your faith, to say that you made philosophical reflections. iI's not enough to say there had been a delusion, because our organization was trying to do sometihng that for us was very important and our bosses that said the contrary. That is not enough. There are many reasons and the believers say that at a certain point you lose your faith. Luther could say that God doesn't give you any longer the grace of faith. There can be many episodes that can explain a lot of things. I give you one.
Once, we who were belonging to the Rome directorate of the organization of the Catholic students, were invited to meet the pope, Pius XII. We made a bet. My friends said, "We are convinced that you are unable to tell a joke to make him laugh." So we bet a dinner. And, as a matter of fact, I succeeded in telling a joke during our conversation ,and he smiled. So I had my dinner. Irrelevant. But during the meeting the pope, very spiritual -- do you remember Pius XII? -white, pale, very supernatural -- saw a young man with a medal.. "Oh, what is this medal?" And young man said, "Is the first prize, the national awardfor the championship of ping pong." And the pope asked, "Ping pong, what's that?" And somebody said, "Is table tennis." - "Ah," pope said, "tennis, beautiful sport." -"Ah," the young man said, "it's not tennis -- table tennis." -"Ho, ho," the pope smiled. "Is not so tiring." And so I discvered that in this moment, Pius XII heard for the first time about ping pong.
Now I don't know if you know how the Italian Catholicism is organized. Every parish has a priest and has a bunch of young people around the parish, and the basic instrument of the community is the ping pong, as in China. It was impossible at that time to conceive of a small parish in Italy at least without ping pong. It was the first object a priest put there in order to have young people around. So in a sense ping pong was the sym;bol of Catholic organization.. [Hushed voice] Pius XII, born Prince Pacelli, had never been in his life, not even in his youth, in a parish. He was educated to be a pope but he never saw what the real life of Catholic people was. I'm not saying that this determined my apostasia but [laughs ]I am choosing it as an epiphany of the disappointment I felt in tthis moment -- to find that the pope had never been ,as every other human, as every other priest in the a parish ,in his own parish, in his city, in his village, because he would have known what ping pong was. It was as if I discovered that the pope didn't know what a cross was or what a rosary was.
So in the early 50s I abandoned the organization and there was many people that abandoned it with me at that moment. And among them, very important people, the philosopher Gianni Vatimo or the extreme leftist organizer Tony Negri, who is now in Paris because in Italy he has beeen condemned to 30 years, and some others who are now or who were until recently Christian Democrat ministers. So it was a very strange diaspora.
You know, some years ago I met, 25 years later, one of my old pals, who was until recently a Christian Democrat minister, and I told him, "Do you realize that one third of us are in the government, one third are in jail, and one third are -- there is an expression formerly used in the socialist and communist movements all around the world in order to say those people who were okay, more or less linked to the left but who didn't belong to the party, who were doing by themselves. The expression was cane ciorti, chiens sans colliers,free dogs,wild dogs. So one third, like me, are free dogs, not belonging to a specific...
But I think that all this period of my life was the most romantic one because afterwards I did what every writer or schloar does: belong to groups, taking part in debates, nothing really exciting.
Vis.: Furio [Colombo, writer, Eco's oldest friend] told me that your working for RAI after university, he is convinced that there the Opera Aperta [Open Work,1962]was born.
For sure. Immediately after my graduation it was difficult at that moment, due to the Italian situation, to find a place in the university, and there was this opportunity to apply for the position in the TV and radio, and as far as TV was concerned we were in a pioneering period, 54. The Italian TV had started since two, three years. It was at the beginning. It was pretty exciting to try this experience. So I stayed in the TV from 54 to 58. Then I went to make my military service, because being in peacetime it was possible to postpone the military service till 26 years and I postponed it. And after the military service I started my activity in publishing and in the university. I didn't make a great career in the televison. I started with a salary of sesanta mille lira, $50 a month in 54 and I ended it in 58 with a salary of $75, $80 -- probably because they were very suspicious of those new people arriving. So I did nothing interesting but I saw a lot of things and I met a lot of persons. For instance, at a certain moemnt I succeeded in becoming the assistant of a director of the artistic programs who called me his alter echo instead of his alter ego. He was a fantastic man because, during the fascism, he invented a small publishing house that published under the fascism Brecht, all the German expressionist poets, and then Joyce and then Singhe, The Playboy of the Western World. He was a crazy anarchist intellectual.. And then he became the director of the artistic programs of the television. He was alone, he needed some young person to help him. Okay, I succeded in becoming his assistant, friend. I spent nights and nights in his house with thousand thousand thounsands of books, rummaging in the first edition of the first poem of Eluard, the first edition of the first text of Tristan Tsara because he was a man that lived that period. One of his friends had a house full of Paul Klee paintings that the man bought for $5 each, because at that moment Klee was an unknown young painter. So it was a group of people that really were interesting. And living with this man, whose name was Ferdinando Ballo, and I still remember him with gratitude, love -- he died in 58 of cancer -- in his office, in his house, I met his friends, and his friends were called Igor Stravinsky, Bertold Brecht... It was very common to meet them or to listen them. I was doing nothing. As a job I was wasting my time in chatting with my boss and in doing...
Vis.: Furio told me you were in charge of ... Let him tell it: "Umberto had the incredible privilegte of being in charge of what were called in the Italian television, the annunciatrici, which are a group of girls, beautiful, they are in charge only with appearing and saying, 'Now, ladies and gentlemen, you are going to see this and this.' There were no commercials at that time to connect different segments. So Umberto was in charge of the annunciatrici," substitutes, so to say, of the spots to come, substitutes who were "the thought of every one of us, and we knew to whom to apply and where to go."
Yes, but in order to justify my presence there, I made the most incredible jobs but the real ... and at the time, one floor up, there were some young musicians, some of my age, some a little older than me. They were Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Paolo Moderna. And we met every day in the bar of the television drinking our capuccino, and we became close friends and we started to discuss. And it is true, my first meeting with them meant a lot. Not only in order to understand all the problems of music and contemporary music, but my personal copy of Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistque générale, is the one I stole in the office of Luciano Berio. Because at that time they were the musciains that studied Troubetskoy, Saussure, all the structural lingusitics, in order to understand some of the problems concerning sounds, voice... So it happened that Berio introduced me to structural lingusitics and that I introduced him to Joyce, and we made some experience together on the texts of Joyce, and, yes, this friendship, this everyday contact ,was enormously important to me because it is thrugh Berio and the musicans that I met in Paris Roland Barthes for the first time, and then in New York, Roman Jakobson, because they were interested in those kinds of things. And so this explains the formation of that book of mine, The Open Work, that was born by the constant everyday interaction between a young philosopher and young -- difference of ages of four years, less or more -- young musicians that were starting the new experiments in electronic music and so on. So in this sense, the five years of 54 -58 and 59 I spent in television were nothing from the point of view of the job, of the career, of the salary, but from opera to music to theater, I met everybody. It was an enormously intersteing experience, let's say, like a grant in which I was paid to see what happened around me. And it influenced my further activity. At that time I was trying to demonstrtae that what happens in literature has the same structures as what happens in music.
Let me say today, especially in the United States, there was until not so long ago, a few years ago, a lot of reserach about what they called reader-oriented criticism.. It means that the focus on the cretical attention shifted from the author to the activity of the reader. Well, okay, Jauss, who was the master of the reception Esthetic, once said that the first who tried to open this way was Eco with the Opera Aperta. That is what is said by David Robey in his introduction to the English language Open Work from Harvard. Maybe I was or I wasn't in 62 among the first to focus the activity of the receptor, of the reader, of the addressed upon the activity of the author. No matter, the lurid game of who is first. The important thing is I was pulled to that just because the musicians at that time were conceiving of works that had to be in some way manipulated by the receiver in order to be understood. So in this sense it was a very crucial expreince for me. John Cage ... ah, if you want gossips...
Between 56 and 58 they started in Italy a quiz program that became enormously popular, like the one with Mark van Doren , and I was not involved in the program of the television because it was depending on another department. But many of my friends were involved. They were the people who conceived the questions and so I followed. I found myself inside. And there was Cage, one of the RAI musicians, who, by the way, even though accepting the courtship of a certain Mrs. Fontana -- Cage was very shocked or pleased, I don't know, by the Fontana courtship, although one of his compositions is called "Fontana Mix" -- a t a certain moment, John Cage is out of money. Well, it was very quickly disscoered that he knew a lot about mushroom.s; music, of course as well. So people said, "Why don't you apply to the quiz program, "Quitte ou Double." "Lascia o Doppia." So the host is asking: "Concerto for toast machine, radio and washing machine with conductor --what is that ?" And there is Cage with this Etruscan smile in face of the whole italian audience -- because at that time there was only one program... Ahhh... [Laughs. Is silent now.] And Bruno Modena. And Peggy Guggenheim with golden shoes, drinking champagne to celebrity the victory of John Cage...
In the now quiet room, the tiny King Kong descends the Empire State.
Vis.: And Gruppo 63?
The Group 63 was a sort of biologidal gathering of young generation against the old German-oriented idealism in esthetics, old literature. It's impossible to define Group 63 according to a unified theory of ideology. They all were tyring to do someting new and helping each other against the old professors and old gentlemen, etc. But at that time it was important to quarrel and to fight for art and for ... for Polack for ... because there was still a lot of people refusing comprehending., for example, the communist part that at that time was strongly realistic. And so it was repeating a little the old adventures of the early avant-garde groups of the beginning of the century with a small difference. But this small diffence was very important for me. The early avant-garde, as opposed to our avant-garde that was called the neo-avant-garde ... they were living poorly, trying to make paintings and living in the mansards, even though we can say today that Picasso made his living pretty well -- they were marginals. The new avant-garde, to which I belonged, was not a marginal avant-garde. We were all writing in the newspapers, working in the publishing houses, so it was an avant-garde made by people very well inserted within the cultural system.
Hegel once said that stories repeat twice in history, the first time as a tragedy and the second time as a comedy. So you couldn't repeat the avant-garde adventure of the beginning of the century the same way. Our avant-garde was of people very well inserted in the so called neo-capitalistic system, newspapers, university... We were not people at the margins trying to ... no, we were in the center. and being in the center, we were crticizing the system, which was different. Once I used the expreession, "We are the avant-garde in wagon lit." Because we went to the various places in which we made our meetings, okay, by airpline, by wagon lit. It is very important to stress that we were not drop-outs. It was different, thenew avant-garde, from the early one. They were drop-outs and they won. But we, we were already inside andwe started to criticize the cultural system from inside. It is neither our virtue nor our flaw. We were there. So the slogan "avant-garde in wagon lit" means that it was impossible to travel but in wagon lit. Okay, we were not playing the role of the drop-outs, we were drop-ns.
Vis.: Then comes 64, 65, the semiological work.
And then comes 68. I want to make it clear that when the 68 arrived I was 36. I was no more a student or a young person.. I was already a university professor. It was a shock to me to see this young generation putting forth questions and ideas that were in contrast probably with parts of my ideas. And I belonged to this generation of middle-aged intellectual -- if you prefer, 36 middle-aged -- that tried to implement a dialogue with them. There was the generation before me that was destroyed by them. My generation tried to keep going, to continue talking, even though the universities were occupied and [pauses] I ... in a way I believed in them, I believed that they were bringing out some new ideals of purity. Probably it is due to the fact that I never act as an advisor for publicity, for advertising, for a corporation, because I feel that it was a way to prostitute my intellectual ... I never made money by selling my expertise, my wisdom to corporations, even though many made. And there is a page in the Pendulum in which Belbo says, I am very deluded because we tried not to invent new slogans for Coca-Cola in order to remain pure, and then you, the young generation, sold yourself out for it. It happened, Marshall. My generation received from them a sort of very Puritanic appeal.
But at the same time, my problem with them ... in the moment in which they were saying, "This is a selling-out-everything culture, this is only a conspiracy of capitalism," my problem, my duty was to tell them that certain things are important. So even in the most hot moments of the 68 -- occupations of the universities -- by installing a dialogue with them, I was able to keep going teaching what I believed in. There were moments of...very difficult moments at that time. For instance I was teaching -- at that time we called it semiology, theory of communication -- and came the uprising of the students: "All those things are capitalist plot, we are for the revolution!" But since I was dialoguing with them, I proposed, "I want to make you an analysis of communication in the capitalistic system." And they said okay. And I continued to do what [laughs] I did before. Seen today is pretty ... it looks tricky, but at the time you had to pay a sort of homage to their problems.
Okay, we are talking of communication in capitalistic system. And I continued to make my classes in semiotics, maybe adding some Adorno books, but also I remember that in 68 I was working with a seminar of revolutionary students and making them read mulch or Saussure. They trusted me because I was talking with them ... is a very delicate moment for that problem. I am not saying that I was tricking, I was really feeling that they were bringing new ideas and new ... but at the same time I was feeling that there was some certain things that they had to know, otherwise they would be lost. Lost. Would have been lost. In the Pendulum I say, "You can say you can make the revolution, but you have to reorganize the railways. And there must be somebody who knows how to drive locomotive." Well, my attitude was more or less that. I understand you, I understand all your problems. I try to give up with a lot of my former ideas, but okay, to know how a locomotive works is important. So my relationship with them was of this kind, and more or less we succeed in going on from different perspectives. If at that time the main problem was the contestation, the students attacking the professors, I lived the 68 in a sort of conflictual but friendly interaction.
Vis.: You were never strongly or personally attacked by the students?
No ,I was discussed, but as friends. We spent the whole day quarreling, but then we went to dinner together. And probably -- I don't know if it was the right way, -- but this moment was also important to me. They were bringing up new ideas of purity. And then they betrayed them.
After the collapse of 68, some of them went to the terrorism and some of them are now tycoons. But for me it was important, maybe not for them. But for me it was a [sighs] vendimento di ... examen of conscience, it was a way to reflect about the position of an intellectual. I tell you that all along my life I never accept to be the advisor, the consultant of an advertising, of a commercial, even though they gave me a lot of money. And that is due to the kind of morality I received from the 68 confrontation. Most of them did it, but I didn't. Later they did it. But I didn't because it was [pauses] an important problem. [Breaks off] Is a very strange story.
Silence.
Even though I understand all the problems of the 67-68, the confrontation, I couldn't accept terrorism and during the hard years of terrorism I wrote a few articles in which I told my opinion on that. In Travels in Hyperreality you find this analysis, the analysis of photograph. I wrote some articles in which I tried to demonstrate that terrorism was culturally, politically and ideologically inconsistent, even though I knew that many of the terrorists were probably my former students, my students even at that time. It was later when all the terrorists were in prison, most of them, according to the Italian law could follow in prison university courses and ask for having exams. So it happened frequently with me to go with commission of professors to make an exam in a prison. And so it happened to me that some of the terrorist leaders, years later, who prepared my exam, more or less well, some of them and not the last of them, some who were the leaders of the movement, told me, in a moment in which they were already in prison and so they had no interest to be kind with me, to adulate, that when I wrote some of those articles during the terrorism when they went in jail and they were already in jail, told me that when I wrote articles, they devoted some seminars to discussing those articles, in order to say that it was true what I said. I was pretty pleased of that fact that terrorists in jail discussed together my articles and said probably he was right and we were wrong. And I don't know what does it mean. For teacher is ... is important to ...
Vis.: Everyone has only laudatory things to say of you. Is there nothing of a polemical Eco?
They were laudatory?
Vis.: Everybody laudatory, as if your whole life had been lived free of controversy.
Always completely into controversy and ... I feel to have lived my life in a continual controversy.
Vis.: All erased now. Give me a sense how it was.
I feel to be a filthy opportunist who has ... but once ... I give you my personal feelings. I am a filthy opportunist. Okay, but once in Philadelphia I found an Italian adult person who was student when I was, and he told me, "We love you because in every moment, you made the right choice."
Vis.: What were some turning points when maybe the choice wasn't right?
When [pauses] ayii, no, no, please, I ... [silence, debating ]. When it was easy to be a member of the Communist Party in order to be a supported intellectual, I was attacked by the Communist Party.
Vis.: I'm sorry.
I am a lucky person. I was never obliged to sell myself in order to live. I don't ... I don't ...
Vis.: Is that why you call yourself an opportunist?
No. Sometimes I say but maybe I was ... but as a matter of fact ... I didn't become a university professor -- because I was not linked to a group, to a party -- until later. I lost two opportunities but finally I got it. When I wrote The Open Work I was attacked by the old people, by the communists, by the ... but after all, it worked ... [exhales] ... that's the formula. Probably I was a miserable ... [breaks],but I never belonged to a group in order to win.. [Pauses] Especially in a Latin country is important to belong to the Communist Party or to the Socialist Party or the Christian Democrats or Free Masonry or to the group of Croatian philosophers or to the group of--
Vis.: Which means that during your life there had to have been attacks on you, polemics against you or with you because you weren't a member.
Yes, but at the end it worked. I always fought as a solo flyer. The formula is that one. I fought as a solo flyer. And then the other formula: when I was corporal, I fought in order to become sergeant and never lieutenant. I didn't try all of my life to jump too much over; corporal, sergeant, Marshall, lieutenant, captain, colonel, general.. I made all the steps, I didn't try to shift from corporal to captain, I waited. Is not a principle of morality, I want not to play the hero. Is a principle of reasonability, if not wisdom. If you are a corporal you have to lobby and to do your best to become a sergeant, not to become a captain.
Vis.: Where was the most pain in the professional life?
Oh, according to the gossips in the academic milieu I should have had my chair in 67. But I wasn't belonging to a group or to a clique, and so I was dropped. And I had to wait eight years until 74 and I suffered ... of it. Then I suffered for the fact that each of my books was attacked. By everybody. But ten years later was accepted. It helped me to go on. It means that probably you have to write books that are attacked immediately in order to be ... [laughs] ... respected twenty years later.
You know, Benedetto Croce once said, "The duty of youth is to age." I am a man of a number of years with two adult children, and I still like to make love. But if the genie of Aladdin arrived and told me, "You have to choose: you can make love all along the rest of your life with the most beautiful women of the world, but you cannot have more children -- or you can make still a child, but you are condemned to make love only once more in your life"-- probably I would -- even at my age, after two kids -- select the second option. [Pauses] And for the rest, masturbation.
I remember that after graduating with my friend Furio, one evening in Milano at the age of 22, we said, 'We have finished university, we are starting new jobs but what do we really want to do with our lives?' And I remember to have answered, "I want to make a book and a kid, because they are the only ways to overcome death, a paper thing and a flesh thing. Lovemaking alone, for all its pleasures, is stupid; nothing comes of it. But my death can have a sense if somebody survives me and continues. And I write a book, not to have a success now, but with the hope that in the next millennium, it will be still at least in a bibliography or...
I don't know if my biographical chips are enough for you, but I have not nothing else. I never killed my mother, never killed my father. But I think... listen, Marshall, I have no answer.
I have no answer and I want to piss because this is one of the most important ... andiamo, subito.
End
"Personally, even in my country,
I have always avoided such meetings"
For the last two years I have researched a book on technology that I have never wanted to write and that I never should have contracted for. Forget the reason. Enough to say I have taken every opportunity to avoid it, even to bolting from a faraway city if something interesting were happening back in New York. So it was a year or so ago that I skedaddled out of a marketing meeting before lunch and raced down I-405 to LAX. It was April 1 and Umberto Eco would be speaking at 6 p.m. on 62nd street. Eco's my old teacher and I'm his assistance, as we used to say in Europe; his audience, perpetual student everywhere he speaks.
Besides, he's a neat guy. How so? Here so.
We were in Bloomington, Indiana, where he was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the university. It was 1989 and he was autographing fly leaves of his second novel -- "special printing, special binding, human skin," he tells me -- soon to be published. At a desk in the corner of a huge room overseen by mooseheads on dark paneled walls, he sat in an armchair on a white wall-to-wall carpet the size of a basketball court. The room - "the memorial they give to me" -- was fit for a mob sit-down. Because the work is drudgery, he tells tales -- "During filming of Name of Rose" -- I meantime his puller, pulling sheet after sheet away as he brings forth another -- "...boy became enamored of Valentina Vargas. She had other interests, he was obsessed. So [director Jean-Jacques] Anneau got a woman for him: 'Fuck him, keep him happy.' During fucking scene they were doing it and Anneau said, "Cut, cut, cut,' and they wouldn't do it. [Swerving] I will die but I had the morning with a cabalist, the afternoon with a semiotician, the evening with an article, I have to survive..." And he walks to the kitchen fridge and, opening it, pointing to a six-pack, says, "Yesterday I have seen here these beers but I was looking for ice cubes. I wanted a good drink but I see here the typical as food for a family. You put it in the center of the table and then you open and share it. And everybody will have his reasonable portion, and the same for the cheese in the box and the pretty pathetic cold cuts which squat on these trays."
A micro-American mythology: Excess. If the coffee doesn't slosh over, if the burger ain't a whopper, then by God bring the whole fucking family around!
"Even in dietetic terms, this fridge is for family, is too full. Even in terms of health..." he trailed off and grimaced.
"Just a semiotic feast."
He grumped "no feast at all," and I knew we were alcohol-deprived. So I went down to the front desk and asked the fresh-faced young woman where I could buy a bottle of scotch, and she said, "Is that hard liquor?"
"You bet," I said.
'This town is dry, you'll have to go..."
So I did, all the way out of town, and when I returned to his suite, he
received me at the door -- "Now I relax" -- in a red kimono and black shorts. As he signed and sipped, his ventripotent belly bobbing along,
I asked him if he liked the Isle of Jura and why she had looked at me like a Jew sinner violating the Church of Indiana.
"Is not Indiana, Marhall, is all America except New York and San
Francisco. It means that prohibition has never really finished. There
is always a certain bigotry and a certain embarrassment. Then they meet and they drink a lot, okay. But officially, is a typical Anglo-Saxon...is why in London, pubs cannot sell alcohol before 6 o'clock. Is stupid thing that remains since the origins. I tell you why" -- signing, sipping -- "because the Catholic Church was growing up in Mediterranean area where there is wine, and to drink wine is not so dangerous, while the Protestant milieu was in the north in which you drink scotch, brandy and strong liquor to keep warm and kill yourself. And that is why the Protestants are very suspectful toward alcohol, while the Catholics aren't. Is only now that in America they drink wine, and in England. Before, they drank beer or very strong alcoholic beverage, 33 percent at least. So you understand, you grew a moral, religious attitude of suspicion toward alcohol, while in Mediterranean countries, alcohol was a good bottle of wine and nobody died for wine. So that's why it is conceivable in Nordic countries, from Swden to United States, that people buys a bottle of scotch to drink it alone. In Europe, I mean my Europe, nobody can buy a bottle of wine to drink it alone. Is a social activity."
"So how did I know not to bring wine?"
"Listen. My fame subtracts from me privacy and you knew. It has reduced my lifetime because I spend a lot of time to cope with all the requests. I cannot go in a place because I am recognized so I prefer not to go. I don't go any longer to the opening of theaters, of art exhibitions,
because a lot of people ask me for preface and things, so it reduced
my leisure and my lifetime. So I need, not relax, but silence, solitude.
I need two hours now of silence."
"I'm sorry, I'll get--"
"It's becoming more and more important for the double reason that
being a professor you have always a lot of people talking to you and to
whom you're supposed to talk, and then success brings you people, so
the real happiness to me is complete solitude. I don't answer the telephone any longer because it rings every two seconds. My unlisted number, I use it for calling out because there is always somebody on the other line. Really, it's an impossible life, and this is why I drink scotch and not wine and now I need to be alone."
Weltschmerz in a red kimono. Is that class or what?
So, straight from JFK, I was in the first row("toujours dans le premier rang," he once told on me to Jacques Derrida, "always in the front row") at the Italian Cultural Institute watching Eco present his new book, Misreadings. His owlish eyes sparkling behind his big glasses, he was reading from "The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno (Mike Good-day)":
Television does not propose superman as an ideal with which to identify: it proposes everyman.
Punching it, no cool Edward Said this one:
Television's ideal is the absolutely average person, that is, in quantitative terms, the median. In the theater Juliette Greco appears on the stage and immediately creates a myth and founds a cult; Josephine Baker prompts idolatrous rituals and gives her name to an era. In TV the magic face of Juliette Greco appears on various occasions, but the myth is never born; she is not the idol. The idol is the woman who announces her...
And a little hah! from me, Eco giving me a dirty look. I had remembered a few words his best friend, Furio Colombo, told me: "Right out of college when we went to RAI together, Umberto had the incredible privilege of being in charge of the annunciatrici, a group of beautiful girls who were in charge only of appearing and saying, 'Ladies and gentlemen, you are going to see....' Everyone of us knew to whom to apply."
Obviously jet-lagged, mortified, I stared down at the comp copy I'd taken at the door. My eye was on but I wasn't really reading the line of Eco's translator, Bill Weaver: "Imagine someone with the popularity (but without the vitality) of Johnny Carson and the anonymity of Ed Sullivan, with a touch of Sesame Street's Mr. Smiley," referring to Mike Hello. Stuff like this hasn't happened to me since high school, and when I got the courage to look the dear reader in the eye, he was already at:
Mike Bongiorno drives clichés to their extreme. A girl educated by nuns is virtuous; a girl with brightly colored stockings and a ponytail is a "hippy." He asks the former if she, a nice girl, would like to look like the latter; when he is told that the question is insulting, he consoles the second girl--
Having trouble following, so embarrassed I am:
--praising her physical superiority and humiliating the convent-school product. In this dizzying whirl of faux pas he doesn'teven try to paraphrase, for paraphrase is already a form of wit, and wit belongs to a Vico cycle alien to Bongiorno. For him, everything has one name and only one; any rhetorical figure is a fraud. In the final analysis, a faux pas stems always from an act of unintentional sincerity ... The more mediocre a man is,the clumsier he is. Mike Borgiorno is a consolation to the mediocre, for he exalts the faux pas, raising it to the dignity of rhetoric....
Mike Bongiorno therefore convinces the public, by his living and triumphant example, of the value of mediocrity. He provokes no inferiority complexes, though he presents himself as an idol; and the public repays him, gratefully, with its love. He is an ideal that nobody has to strive for, because everyone is already at its level. No religion has ever been so indulgent to its faithful. In him the tension between what is and what should be is annulled. He says to his worshipers, "You are God, stay exactly as you are."
And all applaud, rhubarb rhubarb, Umberto clasping hands over his head, applauding back. And at dinner cuts a napkin up, astonishingly making it resemble the pope fucked by a donkey. And next day over espresso, before a reading at Rizzoli, asks me my projects and hears a paragraph on Magic Paper, silent as a psychoanalyst. "Basta -- the other?" he interrupts. (I've a contract for another.) He didn't like. And I said, "Indiana, huh?" And he said nothing because the manager came up with a note, pointing at a knock-out young woman at yon table. While he read and I coveted, I remembered Indiana. 1989, Indianapolis, the fourteenth annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of America. Over lunch, Eco was surprised to discover that his keynote speech, "The Semiotics of Fakes and Forgeries," was to be an address, not only to the final sessson of the Semiotic Society, but an address also to the overlapping, opening session of something called the International Institute on Marketing Meaning, with an audience of advertising types from Japan and France as well as Americans.
Over lunch the day before, he poked at his Mexican salad and said, "Where's the beef? Ah, is there, a little. You know that we have this new ambassador, Secchia in Italy, that seems to be terrible. He says four-letter words and the American newspapers wrote a lot about him, all the blunders he makes...the American ambassador in Italy because he's a friend of Bush. But it seems he has a certain humor. Once Ted Kennedy à propos of the Irangate affair, asked, 'Where were you, George, when Reagan...' And Secchia in a public speech said, 'Where were George? He was home fucking with his wife. Hahhahhah. Listen, we will be fucked [pronounced: fuck-èd], returning to the marketers. "They [the opportunistic organizers] don't understand that one of the chances for the semiotic studies was also to be accepted by philsopehrs of language like Quine who is just now friendly. I find this stupid, promising what they cannot deliver. Will be a disaster. Because a good advertiser instinctively knows more about these things than a semiotician. Is stupid to say semiotics can help you. Raphael is a perfect semioitican. He dosn't know the code, he is the code. And the good ones don't come to study semiotics, they are it. I don't see why you are obliged to mention the marketing."
I was at his side on behalf of a New York Times Magazine profile -- he, about to launch his second novel, Foucault's Pendulum. Maybe I was smelling Vanity Fair stuff.
"I am not here for the marketing conference, so why do you put in head of people that there is also this possibility? [In passion] You make publicity for them. Few people in Japan and Paris know that there is this conference. Pay attention. If it is in order to make clear your position or an assertion, remember that in delicate situation, the channel of defense mustn't be bigger than the channel of offense. If somebody writes, 'Marshall Blonsky is a crook in the Indianapolis Star and you answer, 'I am not a crook in the New York Times, you make a million peoples to know that somebody told, you are a crook. If somebody writes in the New York Times that you are a crook, you have not to answer to the CBS because the CBS has an audience larger than the New York Times. I studied the phenomenon."
But I persisted and the next morning, he handed me three sheets of foolscap on which I read my own questions and his answers. Take a look, if you want. Me, I'm (sorry) envying superstardom, panting after what's on the piece of notepaper he's reading.
Q At the meeting there were marketing persons interacting with scholars.
A Personally, even in my country, I have always avoided such meetings. It is not for ideological reasons (in the sense in which in 1968 to be concerned with the business was The Evil).
It is rather a question of critical freedom. I prefer to feel free to criticize certain phenomena without being directly involved with their production.
Q Do you feel that semiotics can be useful for marketing?
A Listen. Every kind of research (from chemistry to literature) can be used for producing something. An advertiser can read Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity in order to understand better how language works. In the same vein a writer can study grammars and dictionaries to improve his/her style. I don't think that Mr. Webster could tell a writer how to become a genius. I am able to analyze the semantic structure of a pun, but I am unable to tell Joyce how to write Finnegans Wake. However there are sociologists that make researches on public motivations for private corporations, and it is not unlawful.
Q What are the borderlines between theoretical research and practical life?
A They are always fuzzy. Certainly a general who read Caesar's De bello gallico can be smarter than his colleagues who only watched John Wayne's molvies. My friend T.A. Sebeok studied for years animal communication. After reading his books I became more sensitive in my personal relationship with dogs. But you had to be a dogs lover from the beginning. Otherwise you would be incapable to understand and appreciate a book on dogs behavior.
He was being diplomatic, which is to say charming. How he really felt and why he had nothing to say about the Magic Paper Project, he told me at the end of our trip when I took his autobiography in his new New York pied-a-terre. What he told me was too passionate to give to the New York Times.
DOCUMENT: Ecobio PAGE: 4 LINE: 17
influenced probably my life. My father was an employee, an accountant.
I was using a crummy PC then.
He knew I was a professor, an intellectual, but he never understood what I did to the day he died, but he died proud of me and I am happy of that. [Pauses] I just wish [pauses] he could have seen something of what happened with the Rose.
I want to make it clear when the '68 arrived i was 36. I was no more a student or a young person. I was already a university professor. It was a shock to me to see this young generation putting forth questions and ideas that were in contrast probably with parts of my ideas. And I belonged to this generation of middle-aged intellectual -- if you prefer, 36 middle-aged -- that tried to implement a dialogue with them. There was the generation before me that was destroyed by them. My generation tried to keep going, to continue talking, even though the universities were occupied and [pauses] I...in a way I believed in them, I believed that they were bringing out some new ideals of purity. Probably it is due to thie fact that I never act as an advisor for publicity, for advertising, for a corporation, because I feel that it was a way to prostitute my intellectual...I never made money by selling my expertise, my wisdom to corporations, even though many made. And there is a page in the Pendulum in which Belbo says, I am very deluded because we tried not to invent new slogans for Coca-Cola in order to remain pure, and then you, the young generation, sold yourself out for it. It happened, Marshall. My generation received from them a sort of very puritanic appeal.
But at the same time, my problem with them...in the moment in which they were saying this is a selling-out-everything culture, this is only a conspiracy of capitalism, was to tell them that certain things are important. So even in the most hot moments of the '68 -- occupations of the universities -- by installing a dialogue with them, I was able to keep going teaching what I believed in. There were moments of...very difficult moments at that time. For instance I was teaching -- at that time we called it semiology, theory of ocmmunication -- and came the uprising of the students: "All those things are capitalist plot, we are for the revolution!" But since I was dialoguing with them, I proposed, "I want to make you an analysis of communiction in the capitalistic system." And they said okay. And I continued to do what [laughs] I did before. Seen today is pretty...it looks tricky, but at the time you had to pay a sort of homage to their problems.
Okay, we are talking of communication in capitalistic system. And I continued to make my clasees in semiotics, maybe adding some Adorno books, but also I remember that in '68 I was working with a seminar of revolutionary students and making them read McLuhan or Saussure. They trusted me because I was talking with them...is a very delicate moment for that problem. I am not saying that I was tricking, I was really feeling that they were bringing new ideas and new...but at the same time I was feeling that there was some certain things that they had to know, otherwise they would be lost. Lost. Would have been lost. In my novel I say, you can say you can make the revolution, but you have to reorganize the railways. And there must be someobody who knows how to drive locomotive. Well, my attitude was more or less that. 'I understand you, I understand all your porblems. I try to give up with a lot of my former ideas, but okay, to know how a locomotive works is important.' So my relationship with them was of this kind, and more or less we succeed in going on from different perspectives. If at that time the main problem was the contestation, the students attacking the professors, I lived the '68 in a sort of conflictual but friendly interaction.
Q You were never strongly or personlly attacked by the students?
A No I was discussed, but as friends. We spent the whole day quarreling, but then we went to dinner together. And probably I don't know if it was the right way, but this moment was also important to me. They were bringing up new ideas of purity. Then they betrayed them. After the collapse of '68 some of them went to the terrorism and some of them are now tycoons. But for me it was important, maybe not for them. But for me it was a [sighs] vendimento di ...examen of conscience, it was a way to reflect about the position of an intellectual. I tell you that all along my life I never accept to be the advisor, the consultant of an advertising, of a commercial, even though they gave me a lot of money.1 And that is due to the kind of morality I received from the '68 confrontation. Most of them did it, but I didn't. Later they did it. But I didn't because it was [pauses] an important problem. [Breaks off] Is a very strange story.
[Resumes] I feel to be a filthy opportunist who has....I give you my personal feelings, I am a filthy opportunist. Okay, but once in Philadelphia I found an Italian adult person who was student when I was, and he told me, "We love you because in every moment, you made the right choice."
Q What were some turning points [when the choice wasn't so right]?
A When [pauses] ayii, no, no, please, I...[silence, debating whether to reveal the unsuccess]. When it was easy to be a member of the Communist Party in order to be a supported intellectual, I was attacked by the Communist Party.
Q I'm sorry.
A I am a lucky person. I was never obliged to sell myself in order to live. I could always live pleasantly without selling myself. Probably I was a miserable...[breaks], but I never belonged to a group in order to win [pause], especially in a Latin country is an important...I never won because I belonged to a group. I won because...[soft] it happened. Imean, you can sell yoruself to Free Masonery, to the Commnist Party, to Billy Graham in order to...I was enough happy to have audience or succcess without [pauses] I didn't pay anything. That's true. That's absolutely true. I didn't pay anything in order to get success. I always fought as a solo flyer. Okay, maybe I have been hypocritical as a man...but as a solo flyer.
I don't know if my biogrpahical chips are enough for you, but I have not nothing else. I never killed my mother, never killed my father. But I think... listen, Marshall, that if you concoct very well the story of the Italian pre- reviews [a scandal], this is...[trails off]. You saw this special issue of Magazine Littéraire. Fabbri [old friend] wrote an article on me with many criticism and many friendly understanding. But okay, I have no answer.
I have no answer and i want to piss because this is one of the most important...andiamo, subito.
So. Umberto said it all with his silence and avoidance, grasping the girl's note, a bit of hot youth to replace signs of a different seduction. Was he right? Does everyone sell himself? Does the slightest touch of marketing -- the dominant art today -- make you a filthy opportunist? Funny, how you remember things when you need them. I remembered this 15th-century Sufi story:
Of the flying insects who, in love with the light
of a candle, longed at all costs for the knowledge
of fire...
One night, some beautiful flying insects met together for a mad flight's desire for the night of the candle. They said, "We must send someone who will bring us information about the object of our unrequited request. So one of them set off and gained access to the castle and inside, he saw the light of a candle. He returned and according to his understanding, reported what he had seen. But the wise insect who decided over the gathering expressed the opinion that he understood nothing about the candle. So another insect went there. He approached the flame with the tip of his wings, but the heat drove him off. His report, being no more satisfying than that of the first, a third went off. This one, intoxicated with love, threw himself on the flame. With his four legs, he called the flame and united himself joyfully with her. He embraced her completely, and his loyalty became as red as fire. The wise insect, who was watching from far off, saw the flame and the loving insect appear to be one. And he said: "He has learned what he wished to know. But only he understands. And one can say no more."
How close to the fire can the insect go before it's filthy red?
Eco passed me the note: "I'm an admirer, in love with your words. Will you autograph for me something?" And there she was -- he's just beckoned her -- standing, gorgeous and 20. She says it aloud: "I'm an admirer." -"Ahh" from Eco. Like a soft grunt. "I am reading...next door...Rizzoli, if you would..." But a young man is now by her side and she declines, "por favor..." -"I see," and writes something in her notebook, and she says adieu. In rapid English -- so rapid Eco can't understand -- another young man (he'd been reading a book next table all along) hisses: "It's all your fault." At me. It's my fault she turned him down! What did I do? I sold my friend out -- how? I'm the opportunist.
End
1 May I add that when I knew him as my teacher/mentor in the 70s, in Urbino and elsewhere, he had no money. For $20,000 he bought a ruined castle near Urbino, near Rimini, scene of the end of "La Dolce Vita." He could only afford to fix up a part of it to invite us scholars at the Center for Semiotics and Linguistics to party there. Barely a penny. Personal testimony.
??
??
??
??
18
