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By Scott Sullivan
Newsweek, September 29, 1986
He
looks a bit like a Maurice Sendak creation. He teaches semiotics,
the "scientific" study of signs, a subject so complex
and abstruse that only a few hundred people in the world have
mastered its rudiments. His breadth of knowledge is mind boggling:
he speaks five modern languages fluently, is perfectly at home
with classical Greek and laces his writing with long Latin quotations
and obscure scholarly jokes. He is, to put it mildly, a colossus
of learning, with the honorary doctorates (13) and government
honors to prove it.
For
all that, diminutive Prof. Umberto Eco, 54, is also a superstar
in the world of popular culture. His lighthearted weekly columns
in the mass market Italian news magazine L'Espresso, which
he has been writing for over 20 years, have won him a vast audience
in his own country. He became an even bigger celebrity in 1980,
when his first novel, The Name of the Rose, proved to
be a surprise best seller. (His publishing house, Bompiani, had
hoped the highbrow thriller would sell 30,000 copies; to date,
sales have topped 4 million.) Now, with the release of the movie
version of the novel, starring Sean Connery, Eco's international
reputation is assured.
Scholarly Conundrum: And yet the runaway success of Eco's
medieval whodunit remains something of a mystery. The first 100
pages are particularly tough slogging, and Eco claims he made
them so on purpose. "I wanted the reader to go through a
penitential experience as he entered the book, just as a medieval
monk went through strenuous tests when he entered the monastery,"
he says. But even after its dense initial passage, the book,
which is told through the eyes of a young novice, is anything
but an easy read. Eco's monks indulge in chapter-long discussions
of such theological niceties as the virtue of poverty, and the
book is a virtual primer on medieval heresies. Even the solution
of the successive murders that plague the monastery turns on
a scholarly conundrum -- the existence of a copy of Aristotle's
"Comedy," a book that was probably never written.
For
all that, there is plenty of sinister atmosphere and highbrow
gags. The detective monk, William of Baskerville, is a dead ringer
for Sherlock Holmes -- one of whose most famous cases, of course,
was "Hound of the Baskervilles." William's young clerical
sidekick is clearly inspired by Holmes' companion and biographer,
Doctor Watson, while the monastery's blind librarian, Jorge of
Burgos, recalls the late blind Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges,
one of whose most famous stories is set in a fantastical library
filled with "every book that was ever written."
Jean-Jacques
Annaud, an Oscar-winning French movie director (Black and
White in Color, Quest for Fire) worked for three years to
capture Eco's medieval world on film -- or as much of it as the
medium allows. "The book is so rich that any rendering of
it will be just one version," says Annaud. That version
is nothing if not lavish. The German producer spent $18.5 million,
a huge sum by European standards, to reproduce Eco's monastery
in precise and authentic detail. Italian artisans built a huge
abbey out of stone and gesso and illuminated complete Books of
Hours.
Chemical flame: Annaud looked at 300 abbeys scattered
across Europe before settling on the 12th-century Cistercian
monastery at Erbach, West Germany, as the site for most of the
film's interiors. The huge outdoor set was constructed on a hilltop
outside Rome. The high point in the film's production came in
February, when the vast monastery "burned down" in
a shower of chemical flame. Eco wasn't there to watch; he was
teaching in Bologna, where he has been on the faculty since 1971.
That wasn't unusual; he had deliberately avoided direct involvement
with the film because, he says, "it's Jean-Jacques's work,
not mine."
Eco
the celebrity-scholar has come a long way from his lower-middle-class
background in Alessandria, a nondescript town about 60 miles
south of Milan. HIs father, an accountant, wanted Umberto to
become a lawyer. But Eco fell in love with philosophy while studying
at the University of Turin and wrote his famous thesis on Thomas
Aquinas. "My father only accepted my career decision after
I had published my first two books," he recalls. After college
he went to work at the cultural desk of RAI, Italy's state-owned
television network, where he met a group of avante-garde musician
and painters; they remain close friends. When that job disappeared
from under him one day, he went back without regrets to teaching,
at the University Florence and later at Bologna.
The
past 20 years have formed a workaholic continuum for Eco. While
his essays are justly famous -- a collection, titled Travels
in Hyperreality, was published earlier this year in the United
States -- his major goal has been to systemize the study of semiotics.
The discipline, which deals not just with words but with such
other sign systems as flags, musical notes, medical symptoms,
and even clothing, has gained significant academic ground since
World War II, particularly in France and Italy. Eco has produced
a series of complex textbooks that attempt to codify his own
ideas and those of his predecessors. He is greatly in demand
as a teacher. His classes at Bologna and his casual off-campus
appearances are packed with worshipful listeners. Earlier this
year, for example, a standing-room-only crowd jammed the hall
in Bologna where Eco and four of his colleagues were conducting
a round-table discussion of the English Gothic novel, scarcely
a subject of urgent concern to most people in this day and age.
Universities in America and elsewhere compete to offer him visiting
professorships.
Eco's
leap into celebrity status five years ago delighted and amused
him, but he is beginning to feel the party has gone on long enough.
"I simply can't spend the rest of my life talking about
a book I left behind me five years ago," he says. Each new
translation of "The Rose" carries an obligation to
conduct more interviews. (He has even written a prototype "stupid
interview" to substitute for the hundreds of repetitive
conversations he has been forced to endure.) While he works as
hard as ever, dividing his time between an apartment in Milan,
a pied-a-terre in Bologna and a rambling former Jesuit
monastery in the hills near Rimini, he has also become something
of a cultural ambassador-at-large, criss-crossing the world from
literary cocktail parties in New York to opening nights in Paris.
His last word on himself: "I am no Renaissance man. Every
single thing I've done comes down to the same thing: the study
of the mechanism by which we give meaning to the world around
us."
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