Originally appeared in The Boston Book Review, 1994.
They landed then at a sixth island, still farther to the
west, where all the natives talked among themselves incessantly, one telling
another what he would like the other to be and do and vice versa. Those
islanders, in fact, could live only if they were narrated; if a transgressor
told unpleasant stories . . . the others would cease telling anything about
him, and he would die.
Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
HB: I’ve read an
interview with you in which you denounce interviewing.
UE: My theory is
that the interview has taken the place of the review. Newspapers are so full of
interviews that once they have interviewed the author they forget to review the
book. In a review you trust that a person will give you an opinion about a
book; in an interview the author is usually advertising himself. The interview
is unfair for the reader. And the author is at his best in the book, losing
years and years to it. In the interview, he gives his worst, so you also get
the worst of the author.
In the present state of Italian press, the interview has
become a way to fill up the newspaper. In Italy, every writer and scholar can
be disturbed during the day — I don’t answer my phone — “Ingrid Bergman is
dead. What is your opinion?” What opinion can you have about it? You say,
obviously, I’m sad, a great actress. “There was a flood in your native city.
What is your opinion?”
HB: You’re
against it?
UE: Obviously.
And today Italian politics is made up of fake interviews in which they ask
somebody something, then change it slightly or isolate a sentence in order to
get a response from other politicians. It’s a sort political discussion made up
of mutual misunderstandings.
HB: Of course, as
a journalist, you regularly interview yourself for your own opinions.
UE: That’s true.
It was understood from the beginning that my column would not have to be bound
to events. If I had read Homer the night before, I would be free to write about
Homer.
HB: Primo Levi,
too, had that kind of access, and wrote with great charm for newspapers.
UE: It’s normal
for the European intellectual. It’s typical of the Italian, of the Spanish, of
the German intellectual to have a continuous relationship with the media, and
with politics, too. It’s not the same here or even in Great Britain. It was a
shock in the time of Bertrand Russell to see a philosopher so involved in
public affairs, atomic disarmament, and the like. It’s completely usual to have
a Gunther Grass or a Sartre involved in politics.
HB: One thing I
find fascinating in your work is that you show there are many postmodernisms,
that postmodernism is recurrent.
UE: Hellenistic
literature was a postmodern reflection upon the past literature. Open and
closed forms are returning episodes in the history of art, and I think that the
postmodern attitude is not a typical feature of our time but an attitude
returning cyclically in different eras.
HB: What do you
mean by postmodernism?
UE: I should say
I don’t mean anything by it because they invented the term, not me. But let’s
say in certain eras you realize you are no longer innocent. You cannot forget
what has been written before, and cannot play the role of the innocent.
Otherwise you are like one of those painters for which there once existed an
academy in Yugoslavia, an academy for producing naive painters, a grotesque
idea of naiveté since you had to be taught to become naive.
When you have lost your innocence and you know the readers,
too, have lost their innocence, literature plays a game upon itself by
quotations and references. A novel can be the novel of itself. That is probably
the case with The Island of the Day
Before, a novel in which somebody is writing a novel while a ghostly
narrator reflects upon novel writing.
HB: You also
discuss overinterpretation, a condition in which meanings slip, imply other
meanings, refuse to come to rest inside themselves. You write about Hermeticism
as a form of overinterpretation: “In the myth of Hermes . . . the causal chains
wind back on themselves in spirals; the ‘after’ precedes the ‘before’, the god
knows no spatial limits and may, in different shapes, be in different places at
the same time.”
Hypertext seems like a good contemporary example of
Hermeticism. Things do not stabilize; they always point to other things.
UE: The World
Wide Web is a systematic hypertext; you can go anywhere. That is different from
hypertext made only, say, of Shakespeare’s opus, in which all the points and
connections are related to a finished corpus of Shakespearean works. You can go
through it ad infinitum but still remain bound to Shakespeare .
With the World Wide Web I came across the site of a Toronto
library to find a book about Freud, to find in Freud the word “sex,” to click
on “sex” and find myself in a Playboy site. With Shakespeare’s hypertext you
cannot do that; you cannot arrive in Playboy from Hamlet. Overinterpretation is
the way of reading in which Shakespeare can lead you to Playboy. When I speak
of overinterpretation, I speak of that reading attitude by which you put your personal
positions inside the text, and in the end are no longer reading the text, you
are reading yourself.
And I give many examples of reading that are disproved by
the text, when you have to respect that text. You cannot say Shakespeare was
speaking of Einstein. Shakespeare didn’t speak of Einstein, he couldn’t,
whereas on the Web you can make any connection between Shakespeare and Einstein
and Playboy; you can spend your nights making weird connections.
HB: The World
Wide Web may be a Hermetic conception in some way, but the fact that it is
implemented electronically on a huge scale changes the way people think and
read, and that would seem to make this
postmodernism different from others.
UE: It is
blatantly true that our Web is electronic but I think that the Renaissance
magus who aims to interconnect every item of the world by a network of
sympathies is pretty similar. In my novel, I speak of the metaphor machine. I
didn’t invent it. It was conceived and designed.
They didn’t have the electronic way of realizing it but the
software was already in their mind. The ideal of a Web connecting everything
with everything is an old dream of mankind.
HB: It’s present
in The Island of the Day Before .
UE: Yes, and
there is a seventeenth-century book in which the author conceived a way of
producing billions of poems in honor of the Virgin. The combinatorial idea has
already been there for centuries. We have only succeeded in making it
electronically possible. And obviously, quantity always changes quality. If
instead of 10,000 permutations, you can make 10,000 billion permutations this
changes your attitude.
HB: In all three
of your novels there is powerful description of machinery. In Foucault’s Pendulum, the narrator writes, “How could I endure in
the midst of that foul concatenation of diesel genitals and turbine-driven
vaginas, the inorganic throats that once had flamed, steamed, and hissed, and
might again that very night?” In The
Island of the Day Before , you write about clocks. And then there is your
well-known statement, “Every text . . . is a lazy machine asking the reader to
do some of its work.”
Why are you so interested in machines?
UE: I was a
failure in mathematics and physics at school. I am unable to understand
mechanical instruments, unable to change a light bulb or use a screwdriver, but
before I was thirty I worked in a publishing house, which is still my
publishing house, and had to put together a pictorial history of inventions. I
had to travel to museums to find images of inventions. For three years I worked
with scientists, and I became fascinated with machines. I found them full of
narrative aspects. When, in The Name of
the Rose, I speak of eyeglasses, I was drawing from my discoveries in the
history of science. These explorations in the history of science and technology
enriched me enormously.
I take machines as fairy tales, not as really working but as
models for mental functioning. That was probably why, when computers came
within everybody’s reach, I became fascinated with computers.
HB: You introduce
computer code into Foucault’s Pendulum.
UE: All the
instruments I describe in the novels come from those early exploration in
machines. As a rare book collector I collect a lot of books on strange
machines. There are people fascinated by horses; I am fascinated by machines.
HB: You tend to
see them not only as complicated but as monstrous.
UE: I look at
them as living creatures. You remember Rube Goldberg, who designed strange and
complex machines in the thirties and early forties? I was always fascinated by
them. As a child, reading about Mickey Mouse captured and tied in rope while a
candle burns the rope, and the rope keeps him from falling down a chute — I was
always fascinated by such tricks. Don’t ask why. Something in my software.
HB: In the
eighteenth century there was a tremendous fascination with the machine,
automatons, the mechanical chess player . . .
UE: Yes, and also
the shitting duck. You put something in the mouth of this machine and out comes
shit.
HB: We make
machines to accomplish a task. They were building machines . . .
UE: For the sake
of themselves
HB: Because the universe
might be a machine.
UE: The
mechanical view of the universe was an important theme all during the
seventeenth and the eighteenth century.
It’s true people use objects as functional objects and when
they are broken they throw them away. I am fascinated by broken objects. I see
them as a piece of sculpture.
HB: As do many
artists.
UE: Yes, like
Tinguely and Arman. That’s probably the reason why Arman and I became good
friends.
I am very very happy you remarked about machines. All my
effort is to transform machines into narrative, to show how much narrative
power they have inside them, how they can tell stories.
HB: Do you truly
see a text as a type of machine?
UE: To the extent
to which our brain is a kind of machine, even the story is a kind of machine, a
strategy you have to set up.
Suppose you say, “Roberto, open the door.” You are not
mentioning the hand. But the reader has to collaborate and at this point
imagines the hand, and the slight movement of opening. The story is a machine
in the sense in which by a few strokes it gets you to create a larger imaginary
world. I’ve always been fascinated by hypothiposis.
All the great rhetoricians from Aristotle on speak of it, that mysterious
activity in which by using words, you create images. You name something and
there is an image in your mind. How can it happen that by using words, which
are sound, you create images in the minds of your reader?
HB: In Foucault’s Pendulum and in one of your
essays you focus on African-based religions, on Condomblé, for example..
UE: I had some
interesting experiences in Brazil and used them as a metaphor for the rest of
the story. In the same way I am fascinated by machines I am fascinated by
cults. Somebody said why does Foucault’s
Pendulum have a long intermission in Brazil; it is extraneous to the story. No, for me, it’s the summary of all the
rest.
HB: The material
you’re interested in usually shows up both in your fiction and your nonfiction.
UE: It’s natural.
It’s like I am looking out of the windows of my country house. There are
beautiful clouds, and they are changing every five minutes. I see a beautiful
cloud, and I decide to put it into the novel. In the same vein, I find a nice
idea, I decide to put it into the novel.
HB: How do you
think about balancing narrative and information, storytelling and erudition in
your novels?
UE: The problem
is to transform erudition into narration. Take the problem of longitude,
central to The Island of the Day Before. It
took me three years to understand the whole story and I had to make it evident
to the reader in non-boring way. So I imagine a talk with Mazarin and Colbert
in which I presume, in ten pages of spy story, to provide my readers with the
necessary information. All the rest comes step by step in reading the novel.
HB: You describe
a powder of sympathy that was used in the attempt to solve the problem of
longitude. A dog’s wound is kept open on a ship in the South Pacific. At an
agreed upon hour the knife that opened that wound is touched in London. The dog
howls and whimpers. The seamen then know London time, and this helps them
determine longitude.
It amazes me that the powder of sympathy and the bleeding
dog aren’t fictions. They were aspects of the day’s science, and employed in
the attempt to establish longitude.
UE: You know, we
are wounding a lot of dogs today in order to improve our scientific knowledge.
What is science if not a wounded dog?
HB: In The Name of the Rose, you sketch obscure
modes of thought but always connect them to the interests of church and state.
The details are a bit hazy but knowledge is always connected to power; it’s
never immune to being used by power. In that sense, it’s never apolitical. I
don’t find that same connection in the later two novels.
UE: I think Foucault’s Pendulum, maybe in an
allegorical way, is linked to power. Plotting and secrecy as instruments of
power play important roles.
HB: It seems
plotting and secrecy have lives of their own in that book, as if suspended
above particular interests.
UE: The smart
reader should understand the links to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s
more masked, maybe, then the links in The
Name of the Rose. But in my interpretation, Foucault’s Pendulum is about the genesis of fascism. Conspiracy
theory, Pat Robertson, these people now, the Michigan Militia — it is an attack
on these people. I should have published it now, not ten years ago.
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