Umberto Eco: “My life ended at 50. And it started again”

This is what a classic definition from a crossword puzzle might look like. Lighthouse of Alexandria, three letters. Answer: “Eco”, who was born in Alexandria (Alessandria), near Turin, in Italy. Why? Because, like a beacon, Umberto Eco illuminates modern intellectual life. An outstanding mind and a giant of erudition, a bibliophile, a polemicist, he had a rare talent for never being boring, even in his theoretical essays. His love of knowledge is contagious.

But it was not his scientific work that glorified him, but the novel “The Name of the Rose”. In his mid-fifties, this highbrow intellectual became a successful young novelist. Six years later, in 1986, a film production by Jean-Jacques Annaud made the novel even more popular (perhaps thanks to Sean Connery, who played the title role of William of Baskerville, the monk-policeman).

But Eco was also a socially active philosopher who regularly expressed his position. During the 2006 Italian elections, Eco, concerned about the spread of racism, widespread corruption, and the poverty of political discourse, called for saving democracy and “removing from power those who led the country to death.”

Psychologies: You are a successful novelist, critic, essayist, analyst of contemporary society – how do you live with so many personalities?

Umberto Eco: Whatever personality I try on, I always have the impression that I am doing the same thing. But in fact, there was a turn in my life that matches the pattern of lines on my palm. Look (shows his hand): my life line stops and continues on, as if after a break.

Until the age of 50, I was a theoretician. Then I became a novelist. Why did this break happen? Because I was too happy with what I had! I got a chair at the university, my books on semiotics were translated into a dozen languages ​​… I wanted to try something else. As a provocation, I sometimes talk about it like this: “Usually, at 50, a man leaves his family and leaves for the Caribbean with a dancer. I found this decision too complicated and the dancer cost too much. I chose a simple solution: I wrote a novel.”

In The Name of the Rose, I included things that touched my soul and that I never spoke about. I talked about things that touched me, attributing them to my characters. Of course, when we begin to tell a story, we use our own memory, our passions. This is no longer a theory.

Do you feel any closeness to psychoanalysis in your work in the field of semiotics?

No, my research in semiotics (the general theory of signs and their association in thinking. – Approx. ed.) consists in working on texts and languages, and not on psychology. But I was interested in psychoanalysis from the very Lyceum, thanks to a teacher who talked to us about Freud. Then I read all his works, as well as the works of Jung and Lacan, whom I, by the way, met.

In Lacan there was something of a jester, an actor, and he, like Mallarmé, was attracted by the darkness with which he played all his life. He interested me more as a writer than as a scientist. At the same time, he undoubtedly had bright insights, and he understood the most important features of the psyche. Too bad he didn’t make it clearer. I made him a character in Foucault’s Pendulum, Dr. Wagner.

Have you gone through psychoanalysis?

I never thought about it. Perhaps this is a kind of Luciferian pride: I feel more competent than psychoanalysts. I could outwit them and am able to analyze myself. By the way, in my books there is a certain psychoanalytic side, in the sense that I talk in them about what really excites me, using my own memories. But I leave the work of analyzing my works to psychoanalysts.

Do you remember your childhood? Do you feel close to him?

Since I started to age, my short-term memory has been deteriorating. If I leave the bedroom to take a book, then when I reach the living room, I sometimes wonder what I went for. But the memories of youth rise to the surface. And my long-term memory works great.

I never lost touch with my childhood. But he really came back to him at the age of 48, when he learned to tell stories. At the age of 12 I was writing fairy tales and composing stories. Then, being too self-critical, I decided that this job was not for me. At that time, I looked at life in the spirit of Plato and considered poets and novelists strange, second-class people. But this addiction never really left me. And I noticed when I started my first novel that all my essays are built on a narrative principle: I always talk about my research before I come to conclusions.

When I defended my dissertation, one of my teachers noted that I did not follow the classical path: a scientist, he told me, publishes only results, and you talk about all the stages of work, also mentioning incorrect hypotheses, as in a detective story. I pretended to agree, but in fact I thought and still think that this is how it should be written! And all my books are written like a research diary. This is how I satisfy my desire to be a storyteller – and I also tell stories to my children!

So you are a storyteller?

Yes. In the end, the theory may have been just a detour. And as soon as my children were too old to listen to my stories, I started writing novels! It was my pleasure, my calling. Everyone has their own calling. There are enthusiastic climbers who climb mountains all their free time, passionate skiers, fearless sailors who swim across the Pacific Ocean alone. This diversity is essential.

I started to be interested in stories very early. My mother read aloud to me a lot: the text that she read when I was 4 years old, I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday. It was in a children’s magazine. I was also influenced by stories about Suzette from another French children’s magazine, Suzette’s Week. It was about castles in which the characters found a secret dungeon, about a treasure. All this has always fascinated me.

Where does your interest in the occult come from, which comes out clearly in your second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum?

I only became interested in conspiracies at the age of 50, around 1982. Not earlier. I am attracted to the occult sciences, like all false theories. The first chapter of my theory of semiotics says: “We recognize a sign as something that allows us to lie.”

Thus, semiotics is a theory of lies. If it were a theory of truth, it would not interest me to this extent. False theories are much more exciting than true ones, such as Darwinism, which does not appeal to me at all.

How can truth be born from a false theory? This is a question that continues to interest me, as does our unique ability to lie. There are no works by Galileo in my collection of books because he told the truth. But I included Ptolemy in it, because he was mistaken in his astrological theories.

Occultists are just as interested in the hidden meaning of things as are semiologists, aren’t they?

And archaeologists and psychoanalysts too! But not a single alchemist managed to find a recipe for turning lead into gold. The occultists never discovered anything despite all their research. Unless you are interested in their activities from a psychoanalytic point of view, as Jung did. In this case, you can really see the collective unconscious hiding under the mask of the philosopher’s stone.

I now have a whole collection of ancient books on the occult sciences, which I started collecting at the age of 60. Previously, I did not have the funds to buy them, but after the publication of The Name of the Rose, I began to receive large fees and thought about what I should do with them. The most natural response was to buy other books. If I were buying treasury bills, I wouldn’t see them, but I can leaf through books. And, since stupidity has always fascinated me, I am also attracted to people who are interested in the occult sciences. Curiously, 90% of them are believers or become believers. But I remained an atheist.

In “Make yourself an enemy. And other occasional texts” you write: “What interests me today is the unhappy love of an island that we can’t find anywhere.” What is this island?

I will tell you two recurring dreams that intrigue me. In one, I find myself in a city that I know very well and where I taught – in Bologna. There I turn off the road, leave the city center and find myself in the countryside. And from there I can’t go back.

In the second dream, I have to meet someone, a woman, in the apartment I rented, but I forgot where this apartment is and I don’t have my keys with me. The island that cannot be found is a metaphor for everything that we dream of, but cannot find in any way.

These dreams with a mystery that needs to be solved, this close attention to false knowledge, to conspiracies – is this related to a family secret?

Alas, I was born into a family completely devoid of secrets and everything mysterious. The only hoax were attempts to convince me of the existence of Santa Claus. At the age of 6, I found out the truth. So my only family secret was revealed quite early.

As a chronicler in the Italian weekly Espresso, you have always taken a critical look at humanity. In your opinion, is it on the path of regression?

I am interested in humanity when it regresses. Not when it’s progressing. The intellectual denounces human mores. He is not the one who glorifies them. He is here to keep an open mind, not to say that everything is fine. Its function is to criticize society.

To glorify the present is available to everyone. There is no need to emphasize the positive aspects of progress, such as writing that today, thanks to drugs and preventive medicine, life expectancy is increasing. Measuring current progress is an interesting exercise. But that’s not my goal. I try to touch on the weak points that we don’t notice at first and name them.

“To touch the weak points and name them” – isn’t this what we all suffer at the present time? The psychological movement in France promotes optimism, a “positive outlook on life”. What do you think of it?

Pessimistic discourse is very common in Italy and Italians complain all the time. I find that the French, on the other hand, do not criticize society enough. The only way to encourage them to do so is to insist that the Italians or the Hungarians, for example, are in the most terrible position. In that case, they might react by wanting to be number one, because they always want to be number one in everything, even when it comes to the decline of a nation (laughs).

In France, compared to Italy, there is nothing tragic. The French are just beginning to be interested in the recordings of telephone conversations of political figures (a hint at the recordings of Patrick Buisson. – Approx. ed.), which are distributed in the press, while in Italy we have been publishing materials obtained from this type of eavesdropping every day for twenty years. This is what is called publicity.

The French are upset that their president spends his nights with an actress. Whereas the former chairman of our council slept with fifty actresses. We have already been vaccinated in Italy.

If you had to remember a single thought out of everything you wrote, what would that thought be?

My mentor at university once said to me: “We go on pursuing the same idea all our lives under different guises, and we don’t do anything else.” I thought: “What a reactionary!” Thirty years later, I realized that he was right. The only problem is, I haven’t found the idea I’m pursuing yet!

I really like the phrase of my friend and colleague: “At the moment of death, everything will become clear.” I’m waiting for this moment with some impatience to finally understand what was the main idea of ​​my life.