by CARLIN ROMANO
Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco (1932 – 2016) pursued scholarship with the same determination and good-natured humility as he did fiction PHOTO/Helene Bamberger, Cosmos, Redux
y the late 1980s, every humanities academic on earth talked of his or her Umberto Eco novel in the drawer.
Not a novel by Umberto, of course. No, the novel soon to be written that would equal the international acclaim of Eco’s medieval thriller, The Name of the Rose (1980), which eventually sold 30 million copies in more than 40 languages.
Did any of those books ever get done? Hardly a one. Because to produce a work comparable to that still-singular first novel — not to mention its six successors, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino,(2000), The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004), The Prague Cemetery (2010), and Numero Zero (2015) — you needed to be Umberto. That is, impossibly learned. Indefatigably hardworking. Singularly modest and self-critical. Uniquely open to people and culture high, low, and middle. Quick to laugh and joke. Wise to the importance of entertaining readers — with puns, plot, playful Latin, lighthearted examples, exotic hypotheticals — while guiding them.
You had to be hungry for the latest news and gossip — about anything — and willing to plop it into a narrative composed largely of more sober elements. You had to possess a common touch, an ability to talk and write in the language of the street, which Umberto possessed to a degree I’ve never seen in any other scholar of his stature.
Since February 19, when the unquestioned giant of contemporary Italian literary and intellectual culture died at 84 after a two-year battle with cancer, Italian newspapers have published scores of articles about Umberto, noting that he was, in the view of many, the most famous intellectual in the world. To an extent unrivaled even by such internationally famous compatriots as Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, Umberto also became, over time, the critical conscience at the center of Italian humanistic culture, uniting smaller worlds like no one before him.
Last week his beloved adopted city of Milan saw him off at a secular ceremony in the courtyard of the Castello Sforzesco, the spectacular fortress Umberto could gaze at from the window of his family apartment a few hundred yards away. More than a thousand people lined up to fill the Cortile della Rocchetta — VIPs such as Italy’s ministers of culture and education, as well as ordinary Milanese — to view the simple wooden casket placed beside Umberto’s folded academic robes from the University of Bologna, at which he taught for 41 years.
Roberto Benigni, the Oscar-winning actor, director, and Eco friend, laughed repeatedly as he recalled Umberto’s unstoppable sense of humor. The jazz musician Gianni Coscia, Umberto’s friend since high school, remembered when Umberto’s mother pleaded with Coscia when they were teens to steer Umberto from philosophy to law, so he wouldn’t starve. Coscia replied, “Relax, Signora Rita, because no matter what Umberto does, I assure you he’ll never go hungry.”
The actor and musician Moni Ovadia alluded in turn to Umberto’s ironic transformation from a leader of Italy’s Catholic Action Youth to committed atheist. Umberto, for all that, ebulliently indulged reasonable clerics, even co-publishing a book with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini. Ovadia offered a benediction “from a believer to a nonbeliever,” announcing, “God blesses you above all because you are not a believer. God supports believers, but he definitely prefers atheists.”
That Umberto would be cremated later in the day surprised some people. Not me. Umberto exulted in hurtling into the past through texts, in fulfilling Kierkegaard’s admonition to understand backward but to live forward. Umberto once observed, “The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.” With typical Umberto mischievousness, he probably thought of cremation as his one chance to experience an auto da fé.
There will be decades to assess the lasting importance of Umberto’s novels, his philosophical work, his prolific intellectual journalism, his sardonic criticisms of both terrorists and the likes of Berlusconi and Italy’s political elite. But one should salute, for the moment, his wonderfully tart voice.
A few years ago, he bluntly remarked that for Italian political life to change, “about a dozen very powerful people have to die. It is a biological fact. It’s necessary for there to be a new political class.” About Berlusconi and his “bunga bunga” partying, Umberto famously commented, “I also go to bed late, but because I read Kant.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education for more
via Arts & Letters