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[applause]
Michael Enright: Thank you. Good evening and buona sera. Welcome. "Entering a novel is
like going on a climb in the mountains. You have to learn the rhythms of respiration,
acquire the pace, otherwise you stop right away." Now, you'll notice that in that quotation,
our guest, Umberto Eco, uses the term, "entering" a novel, not "reading" a novel but "entering."
And it's most appropriate, because when you start an Umberto Eco novel, you are indeed
entering something. A new, strange, often unexplored, sometimes threatening, often hilarious
world, and you do indeed have to adjust your rhythms of respiration. For decades, he has
dazzled millions of readers with daring leaps of language and narrative within the literary
imagination. He was 48 when he wrote his first novel "The Name of the Rose" and he wrote
it, he said, "because I felt like poisoning a monk."
[laughter]
ME: It became an immediate international phenomenon, selling more than 20 million copies. Mr. Eco
was born in the city of Alexandre in the Piedmont region of Italy. Ignoring his father's advice
to become a lawyer, he decided instead to study medieval philosophy and literature at
the University of Turin. He said he developed a passion for the middle ages the way some
people develop a passion for coconuts. He also began a lifelong study of modern media
and symbolism, and he's one of the world's leading semioticians. His latest novel, "The
Prague Cemetery" is a darkly comic and hypnotic examination of hate, pure and simple. Let
me correct that, there is nothing in the novel that is pure and simple. His central character
is despicable, without any obvious saving human qualities, but at the same time he's
one of the most interesting characters in recent literature. "The Prague Cemetery" has
already become a best seller in Europe and is sure to do the same in North America. Ladies
and gentlemen, Mr. Umberto Eco.
[applause]
ME: Welcome, thank you for coming, joining us tonight. Before we talk about the book
and literature and so on, I want to ask you something quite off topic, the recent death
of Steve Jobs reminded me of an essay you wrote back in the 90s, in which you said that
the Apple, the Mac was Catholic and the PC, Microsoft, was Protestant.
Umberto Eco: Yes. It was before Windows.
ME: What did you mean?
UE: It was before Windows.
ME: Oh, good. I'm glad. Oh, I'm glad, yes.
UE: Because Windows is Anglican. It's the Church of England. [laughter] The Church of
England, half-Catholic and half...
ME: How is Apple Catholic? And be careful how you tread because...
UE: It was Catholic in the sense in which it was counter-reformist. Everything is clear
by paintings and tells people what to think, what to believe. While PC, at the time in
which you have still to make your program with the basic, you were in a private relationship
with The Bible. You had to make a personal interpretation, and so it was not so easy...
It was not so collective, the feeling, everybody had the personal relations with Bill Gates
instead of God. [laughter]
ME: But, my concern is which operating system guaranteed your entrance into heaven? [laughter]
UE: Or into hell.
ME: Or hell, yes, yes.
UE: Which sometimes is the same. [laugher]
ME: You said that, in the writing of "The Prague Cemetery" you wanted to write about...
You wanted to create, I guess, the most hateful character in literature, this was what you
set out to do.
UE: Yes.
ME: Why?
UE: It was very naive, because then I, reflecting upon that, I must say that the colleague of
mine, Shakespeare did his best in creating Richard III or Iago and the Fagin of Dickens
was not so bad, so I am not alone. But Simone Simonini is a forger that, among other things,
that creates the, in my novel, "The Protocols of Elders of Zion".
ME: The Elders of Zion. He's a terrible a man.
UE: He is a racist, a full-fledged racist, not only anti-Semite, anti-German, anti-French,
anti-Italian, anti-women. And so manoeuvring, using such a dirty material as old, the racist
cliche, I had to keep the reader and myself maybe, far away from the character, so I had
to create a totally unrecognizably negative character. The fact that then once started
this endeavour, a narrator feels that the taste and the pleasure of making his character
more and more repugnant. Okay, that is unavoidable.
ME: Is it more, I don't know if "fun" is the right word, is it more interesting to you
to create a character of absolute evil rather than one of absolute good?
UE: No, no, in my novel, I have very nice characters that I love and with whom I could
identify. No, no. But in this case, I had to create a bad guy.
ME: He's a virulent anti-Semite.
UE: Yes.
ME: And has never met a Jew.
[laughter]
UE: As many racists...
ME: He dreams about them.
UE: He is the grandchild of alleged historical character, the grandfather, Simonini, who
was, so to speak, the creator of all the set of cliches of the 19th century anti-semitism
with a letter he wrote to the abbott Barruelo. Nobody knows if that Simonini really existed
and whether even that letter was a forgery, but in any case, it was published and republished
and widely circulated, not only public but in the secret services, Vatican, the secret
police of Napoleon III, and so it influenced the 19th century anti-semitism. My Simonini
who is the grandchild receives being practically an orphan because the mother dies and the
father wasn't a hero, there's always a way to fight for... So he lived under the oppressive
shadow of these reactionary. Grandfather was imbued with those ideas even though he never
met except Dr. Freud when he was in Paris.
ME: It is a novel and yet when it was published and certainly when it was published in Italy,
the chief rabbi of Rome, the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, criticized you saying
that you might taint readers with the scourging brush of anti-semitism.
UE: Yes, nobody pronounces such a word as anti-semitism. In both cases they said, "Even
considering the good intentions of the author, there is the risk." But they were two different
attitudes. L'Osservatore Romano was shocked by the fact that the Jesuits and the Pope
Leo XIII, play a very painful role in this story because they committed a lot of mistakes
in the case of Leo Taxil and L'Osservatore Romano, at that time, was one of the big anti-semites.
So, since they couldn't react defending the Pope, they tried to say, "You are disturbing
the Jews." So the fact that L'Osservatore Romano in order to defend the Jesuits plays
the produce... It is an interesting case.
ME: What about the Chief Rabbi though?
UE: That is another... Before publishing the book, I wanted ten Jewish friends of mine
to read it in order to have advice. In fact, one of them said, "For the Jews, no problem.
I think that the Jesuits would be upset."
[laughter]
UE: But they have the same initials, so sometimes... And they had this meeting with the Chief Rabbi
who, in fact, he loved the book but he expressed a pre-occupation. I would say if I were the
Chief Rabbi of Rome probably I would express the same pre-occupation that can be weak readers
that can take seriously all those cliche. My objection at that time was, "But these
people, they push a button on Internet, they can find all these every day without the control
of an author." But the good objection came from another Rabbi in Rome and from the Director
of the Schwab Museum. They said, "For stupid, politically correctedness, we try not to mention
any longer those cliche because it's so vulgar, and so we are making people to ignore that
they are still there circulating. So it's important to spell them aloud." It was a real
objection that seems to me, at the end one of those people said that the book should
be read in the schools in order to understand what racist is.
ME: But in "Foucault's Pendulum", one of your characters says, "Be careful about kidding
people or fooling people, they might believe you."
UE: Yes, certainly.
ME: Is that a concern?
UE: You are not responsible of the perversion of your readers. [laughter] Thomas Merton.
Thomas Merton, an eminent Catholic figure became...
ME: Benedictine monk.
UE: Became a Benedictine Monk, you know how? By reading James Joyce, "A Portrait of an
Artist" which is the story of an apostasy. So you see, everything can happen. So somebody
can read Thomas Merton and commit apostasy and become an artist. It depends on the rate
of the perversion of your reading because there is a way to respect text. You cannot
say that The Bible encourages the killing of his own brother only because it tells the
story of Cain. And there was an interesting review in the States last week, who said that
at that point, we should say that it's dangerous to read the James Bond novel, because you
can become like Blofeld or Dr. No.
ME: The villains. Yes. You were raised Catholic and then you drifted away when you were in
university, I take it. Did you abandon the church? Or did the church did you feel abandon
you? Was there some...
UE: Both.
ME: Both?
UE: Both. Because I felt, I was one of the members of a Catholic Organization, I was
one of the national, nation of people directly and at a certain point, we were charged with
excessive leftism.
ME: Excessive leftism...
UE: Leftism.
ME: Quite virulent I understand.
UE: And so it was the church to kick us off. And then step by step I abandoned the church
by working on St. Thomas Aquinas [laughter] like Thomas Merton.
ME: That was your first...
UE: My dissertation, my dissertation.
ME: Thomas Aquinas?
UE: Yes. Because being historically correct at every point of the research in which I
love my hero. And I still love him. But I put him in his exact historical landscape,
and it was there, not here. It was correct to do like that in order to understand the
novel, to understand him or her as belonging to a certain historical time and period if
not you commit a certain sandwich operations that are always erroneous. Okay. But this
is an old story. Anyway I am still very linked to all these people, Medieval people from
St. Augustine to St. Thomas. They were very brilliant ones.
ME: But you've written, in some of your essays, you have written extensively about religion,
the role of religion. And at one point, you said that we think we live in a sceptical
age when in fact we live in an age of extraordinary credulity that we believe everything almost.
UE: There is this sentence of Chesterton that I like very much. Chesterton was a was a believer
obviously, and he said when people do not believe any longer in God, it is not that
they believe in nothing, they believe in everything, everything. So the more the religions, the
great religions decline, the more sex, new, new wave of situations, satanism suddenly
grow up.
ME: Is that because we are gullible or we are afraid?
UE: Because human beings need some form of credulity always in order to survive.
ME: In reading your novel, in reading "Prague Cemetery", the reader goes through a catalogue
of evil. A protocols...
UE: Yeah. Because the Simonini not only makes that forgery but...
ME: Goes after Dreyfus.
UE: And kills some people for money.
ME: But in the course of the journey through the novel every once in a while you describe
an extraordinary meal. It's almost, you give like almost a recipe about, why do you bring
food into...
UE: That was a strange... We spoke about perverse reading, and I provoked a perverse reading.
It was a mistake on my part. I exaggerated in giving food to Simonini as a substitute
for sex, because he has no ***...
ME: That's right.
UE: Activity except at the end, but we will not reveal that.
[laughter]
ME: I certainly won't. No, no, no, no.
UE: And I gave him food instead of sex, and I wanted to disgust the reader, because each
of those recipes is fantastic because I worked on the texts of the 19th century of the real
hotel and restaurant, so they are all real... Each of them is probably fantastic. All of
them is a nightmare, is a nightmare, but what for me was only Plato's sound. The sound of
those names. For many...
ME: Of the ingredients... Of the food.
UE: Of the name, the name of the recipe, a la Bourguignon... For many people, on the
contrary, it was a taste appeal. So they loved it. It made, against my will, Simonini at
least in this case, a little human. It gave him a passion, a passion, not for ideas, not
for human beings, but for food, for animal corpse.
[laughter]
ME: Could there be a possibility of a Captain Simonini's recipe book, do you think?
[laughter]
UE: Yes, but that will go against my will and encourage the perverse reading.
ME: Of course.
[laughter]
UE: So you can do that. Me, I guess, again...
ME: That's right, yes... Are there any heroes in "Prague Cemetery"?
UE: Any?
ME: Heroes, good guys.
UE: There are two pure persons, they are killed. [laughter] One is Ippolito Nievo, the Italian
poet, who really died mysteriously. So mysteriously that I was free to invent that Simonini was
the one who killed him, because he was protecting certain secrets of the Garibaldi expedition
and so on and so forth. And the poor Maurice Joly, who was, without knowing, one of the
inspirators of the Protocols because when the London Times demonstrated that the Protocols
were fake, demonstrated by showing that many, many, many, many pages of the Protocols were
copied by this book of Maurice Joly, who was not against the Jews but against Napoleon
III, and one of my... I think of my discoveries is that Joly, if not copied, was influenced
by book of... By a popular novel by Eugène Sue, "Les Mystères de Paris," in which the
same arguments are used against the Jesuits. And...
ME: Amazing to know.
UE: "The Prague Cemetery," which we will speak, was inspired to a scene of "Joseph Balsamo"
of Alexandre Dumas, in which Cagliostro was plotting not with the rabbis but with the
Freemasons against the king of France.
ME: Alright, that raises a interesting question with a novelist writing about history, can
you just make everything up or do you have to abide by certain protocols respecting...
UE: You have to respect absolutely the historical truth, because it's always more fictional
than fiction. [laughter] Take a character like Leo Taxil, many people believe I invented
him because they think it's... It was impossible that a man like that really existed.
ME: Explain... Yeah.
UE: Leo Taxil is a man who spent his entire life by lying, always inventing situation,
inventing the sharks on the Gulf of Marseilles and moving the French navy, inventing a submerged
city in the Lake of Geneva, then invented an enormous anti-Catholic series of books
that at a certain point, he changed his mind, and he became Catholic and made an enormous
series of books against the Freemasons. Then he pivoted again, and he said that he had
done that in order to cheat the Catholic, and he became again a Freemason. But every
moment, in every page of his immense opus, he was always lying and forging and with such
an ease, such a simplicity that is prodigious. He existed, and he did exactly...
ME: You did not make him up. You...
UE: No, no, no, no, no. Oh, no, unfortunately I couldn't quite know the 1,000 pages of him.
He invented the most incredible stories, for instance, that the Freemasons in order to
destroy the world have a hideaway in the Rock of Gibraltar, they were living as a...
ME: How long is... Nothing.
UE: People were believing all that, unfortunate, even the Pope. That's why L'Osservatore Romano
was irritated. But once again, I followed the historical truth. When you write an historical
novel, you have absolutely to obey the historical truth. You cannot say George Washington spent
his vacations in Paris. No. And didn't cross the Potomac, but La Seine. But once respected,
the... What we exactly know about the historical character, seems that 80% of their life is
unknown because we don't know what they did on Friday. There you can insert invention,
provided your invention matches the psychological feature characterization...
ME: It has to be credible of it.
UE: Has to be credible.
ME: At the end of the book, though, in, I'm not going to give away anything, but in the
afterward, you have a section which you've called "Useless Learned Explanations." [laughter]
And you say that this is because the plot is so complicated and the characters are so,
there are so many of them, this is a guide, in a sense, to the plot and the characters,
for readers that are sort of slow on the uptake. [laughter] Why did you put that in the novel?
UE: Probably I had the model of Stuart Gilbert of Joyce's "Ulysses".
[laughter]
ME: Oh, I see. Now, it's a chart and you have little explanation...
UE: I had the impression that at a certain point the intricate complexity of the flashbacks,
flash-forwards, and so and so forth, was... Requested a terrible effort to the reader.
Even though one can read the book without that. But when I discovered that I, me too,
I became a victim of the problem. [laughter] Because since by writing the book as it happens
in the course of six years, you decide to move a certain scene or to the chapter 35
but to the... So, I cut and pasted. At a certain moment, I lost my [laughter] and happily,
one of my translators, who started to translate immediately before the Italian edition, said
"But you say in the chapter so and so that Simonini goes in the cellar and finds three
corpses, but two of them are killed later." [laughter] Oh my God. That's why... [laughter]
ME: That could be a problem. [laughter] Yeah. Do you write on a computer?
UE: Yes.
ME: You don't write in longhand, you go right to the computer?
UE: Sometime I feel the need to take a notes with hands in order to go more slowly. Sometime
I would like to have an obelisk [laughter] and to carve...
ME: Like the Rosetta stone or something.
UE: Yes, because the computer is obviously more literary than the hand because it follows
the speed of your thought. Like in the surrealistic automatic writing. Because that you have not
to pay attention even to the errors, because you correct so you can follow your thought,
the freedom of your thought. But sometimes you feel the need to control your thought
and so the handwritten note can be... What I, we have abandoned is the poor typewriter.
ME: The typewriter, yeah.
UE: It was such a marvellous instrument. So it's only way to survive is the moment in
which there is the Olivetti 22 of the late '50s.
ME: I was told you don't own a cellphone. You don't use a cellphone. Is that right?
UE: I use?
ME: A cellphone. A mobile phone.
UE: Yes, but always out.
ME: What do you mean always out?
UE: It is very important because people believe to reach me and they cannot because it's out.
It's turned off. It's turned off. [laughter]
ME: Doesn't that defeat the purpose somewhat, of having it?
UE: No. No. [laughter] Because it works as an agenda. [laughter] You take your notes.
ME: But it's supposed to work as a phone.
UE: Yes, but I don't want to receive messages, and I don't want to send messages. [laughter]
At my age, I have deserved the right of not receiving messages. This world is overloaded
with messages. And even each of them says nothing.
ME: You wrote a series of essays once, in which you went across the United States. You
went to Disneyland. And you looked at Disneyland as a kind of series of technologically perfect
simulacrum, that... You said, I think in one of the essays, that it's trying to teach us
that technology can give us more than nature can.
UE: Yes. But I was not the only one to make observations like that. For instance, my old
friend, who now died, wrote a beautiful essay on Disneyland. In that book, the most original
explorations were in all the museums of reproduction, I saw twelve "Last Suppers" in California.
[laughter] One in stained windows, another in chalk. I saw "Venus of Milo" with the arms.
[laughter]
ME: Aboard the arms. Yes, yeah.
UE: No, no, no... With arms like that. [laughter] While if you follow the logic of the shoulders,
the arms should be like that.
ME: That's right. But you said, to take, to draw inferences from when you're writing in
those essays is that we live in a fake culture. Culture is fake, cities are fake, our literature
in a sense is fake.
UE: Yes, yes and not. I had two problems. One, the model was the "Fortress of Solitude
of Superman" in which Superman has all the memories of his life in small form as a fake...
As a fake, as a reproduction. And I found that this love for the reproduction, what
they cannot have here is a particular aspect of the American culture. Obviously, they cannot
have Palazzo Strozzi and there is in downtown New York, a Palazzo Strozzi, complete for
the first four floors. Then there are 55 more floors that didn't belong to the real Palazzo
Strozzi. But at least... So that's typical of the American culture. But at the same time,
that is, per me, some suspicions about the European notion of authenticity.
ME: Of authenticity. Yeah.
UE: Of authenticity. Because when a... The myth of authenticity. Because when I saw,
I don't remember whether in Sarasota, the Ringling Museum, a Greek sculpture. And it
was sad... There is a modern stone reproduction of a Roman iron statue that was a reproduction
of the original stone Greek statue. I realized that many of the Greek statues we have in
European museum were Roman reproductions.
ME: Actually that's... Yeah.
UE: So, instead of three passengers, we have only two passengers.
ME: Right.
UE: Two mediations. But sometime, we do consider as real as original. But it's no more original.
So it was at the same time, a sort of criticism of European culture. So, mixed position.
ME: Isn't that depressing for you? Doesn't that make you...
UE: I am not using fakes.
ME: No.
UE: It can be depressing for those who take them.
ME: But you don't? You... I mean this is not... You don't think that our entire sort of Western
culture so defined, is crumbling into a kind of series of fake reproductions?
UE: No. Because for instance, Internet gives you the Roman statues and the Greek statues
such as they are.
ME: Right.
UE: Internet is a return to alphabetic culture, is a return to the original document.
ME: Are you on Facebook?
UE: No, I am not. The portable, they have no Facebook.
ME: Oh you don't? Right. Right.
UE: So...