interview with eco 2

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Interview: Umberto EcoAuthor(s): Umberto Eco, Adelaida Lopez, Marithelma Costa, Donald TuckerSource: Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 46-51Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464766

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INTERVIEW

UMBERTO E C O

Adelaida Lopez and Marithelma Costa (AL/MC):We know you've just come

from a two-hour class, and the transition from classroom to interview is prob-

ably jarring. How do you feel when you face a class- like a clown, or like a

priest?Umberto Eco(Eco):Ifeel more like a lover, and Ithink that some of us decide to

teach for the same reason that actors decide to work in the theatre: there's an

erotic aspect to both professions. I've been teaching formany years, but in frontof each new class Inever fail to feel that I'mdoing itforthe first ime. You know

that you have to make the students love you during the firstthree minutes of

class. If hen and there you don't win them over, ifthe students don't sense that

you have fallen in love with them, too, it's all over. You may as well go home.

AL/MC: How do you keep the love affairalive for an entire semester?

Eco: If you win the battle in those first three minutes, there's little to worryabout. I have a similar experience with dogs; they never bite me because,

somehow, they know I'mfond of them. When Iwas a boy, I approached the

most ferocious dogs in my neighborhood, and they always let me caress them.

Once, it'strue, I went to a friend'shouse, and he said to me, "Don'tget close to

that dog, he's a mean dog." I answered that there were no mean dogs, and

when Icame close to the animal, he sank his teeth into my arm. That'snot the

end of the story, though. I stared at the dog and asked him: "What are you

doing?"He looked at me, growled, apologized, and went away. The point is

that animals know whether you respect them whether you're afraid of them,whether you love them. It'sprobably an irreverentcomparison, but the same

thing happens with students. If they realize that you despise them, that youdon't want to teach, that you don't even believe in what you're teaching, they'll

reject you immediately. Otherwise they'll love you, just as I loved the teachers

who loved me and despised those who didn't hold me in high regard.

AL/MC:Love affairsaren'tall peaches and cream, though. They involve a goodbit of aggression. Would you say that teaching is an aggressive act?

Eco: Of course it's aggressive. You walk into class intending to change other

people's ideas; you're going to destroy their assumptions and offer them

another perspective on the world. There'salways an element of possession, of

conquest. The other side of the coin is that in teaching, just as in every love af-

fair,you receive something in return,you understandsomething that you didn't

understand before. Why do I like to teach? Let me tell you what happened

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when Itaught my firstuniversityclass. I had justwritten an article on JamesJoyce, the piecethat latergrew into my book L'Operaaperta. I thought, fine, I'veworked on Joyce; I know

him thoroughly, this class should go well. Itwas a disaster. While Iwas teaching it, Irealized

that I reallydidn't know anything. When you write an article, you can resort to phrases that

are really crutches: "Itis well-known .... ,""it is obvious that ...." Ifyou're facing a class,

however, you can't use those expressions, you have to explain everything; that's what ateacher is there for. So I learned that one should never write a book and use it as a basisfor

teaching a class. One should do just the opposite. First each for three or four years and then,

perhaps, begin to write. In the process of trying to get the class to understand your ideas,

duringthat courtship, you get a lot of different reactions and you deepen your understandingof what you are saying. As you tryto explain and convince students, you explain to and con-

vince yourself.

AL/MC: The Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra, once told us that he is so sensitive to the

audience's reaction to his poetry readings, that when he feels that the atmosphere is not

favorable, he loses his voice. Do currents of hostility in the audience affect you duringyourlectures?Eco: Yes, sometimes the audience's hostilitycan have very destructive effects. There are

tricks, though, that you can use to defend yourself. Ifyou talk and fix your eyes on a single

person in the audience, that person will usually look back at you. Communication with one

or two people will usually help you overcome, or at leasttolerate, little currentsof hostilityin

a room. Now, if you by chance find yourself in front of an entire auditorium that hates you,

you're finished. Fortunately,that almost never happens. Hatred of the teacher was more

common in '68: then, when you were in front of a group of students, rules dictated that youwere the enemy. The teacher was the aggressoralmost by definition. Itwas always the same

mechanism, and so it became a game: when the confrontation was over, the students felt

they had won and they often ended up loving you. Some audiences would show a great ini-tial resistance, which could eventually force the teacher to behave like a whore. Itoften hap-

pens this way: if you want people to love you, you'll have to flatter, you'll have to sell

yourself. Yet I don't believe there's a universal formula for seducing an audience. Take the

unfortunate case of a friend of mine, who has what I call the "captatiomalevolentiae." Do

you know the rhetoricalformula, the "captatiobenevolentiae"? At the beginning of the lec-

ture you say something in order to win the audience over. Well, there are people, like myfriend, who have the "captatiomalevolentiae."They have the giftof beginning in such a waythat the audience immediately hates them. It'spathological.

AL/MC: Once you described contemporary universities as parkinglots for youth, as placeswhich camouflage modern society's unemployment problem. Could you speak about this?

Eco: Basically, it's both a biological and social problem. Do you know what "neoteinia" s?

Well, it'sthe period duringwhich an animal lives under parental protection: a cat, forexam-

ple, has a neotanic period of about three months. The mother licks it, feeds it, protects it, but

afterthree months the kitten has become a professionalcat and goes out into the world to be

a cat. In tribal society, neoteinia lasts around sixteen years, after which young men and

women go through initiation rites. In our industrialworld, the neotanic period is getting

longer and longer. We have raised it to the age of thirty. It is even possible to find students in

the neotanic phase when they're forty. Itwas different for my generation. When we were

about twenty-two years old, we had to leave the universityand enter the real world. Pro-

longed universitystudies are not due to our society's need for more highlyeducated people,because people can be trained by fasterand more efficient methods. IBMcan take someone

without a college degree and teach him or hera computer language in six months. Such long

periods in the universityare not necessary. It seems to me that when a society accepts such

an extended neoteinia, it does so out of self-defense. As long as you're a student, you don't

compete in the job market. It is in this sense that universities are like parking lots, where

young people are led to believe that they're being educated, whereas in realitythey're keptthere for convenience. Only a small percentage of the student population becomes erudite

or scholarly. It seems clear to me that mass universityeducation is a political solution that

saves certain social costs. A thirty-yearold person in the job market might have to be paid

diacritics / spring 1987 47



one hundred thousand dollars per year, while in the university he has a miserable unem-

ployment compensation and, besides, he doesn't represent a problem for the IRS.

AL/MC:Whom does this political solution benefit?

Eco: It benefits power, it benefits fifty-yearold people who earn one hundred thousand.

Overpopulation is not a myth, and a fifty-yearold executive who worked all his life tobecome the president of a corporation must protect himself fromthose thirty-year-oldswho

only want his job. It's he same old storyof the son who kills his father to go to bed with his

mother. Universitiesdiscipline our Oedipus complex. It's not that the fifty-yearold man does

not need thirty-yearolds, the problem is that he needs only a few. This is the first time in

history that people have studied until they reach thirty-five,and that's not normal. I have

helped many of my good students get a job, but they work for six months and then often

resign. Ifsomeone did that in my time he was considered a lazy bum and a fascist.Todaywe

consider such people worthy of respect.

AL/MC:What about elite institutionsof higher learninglike the Center of Semiotic Studies in

Urbino?

Eco: Eventhere you can find forty-yearold women who want to preserve or recapturetheir

youth. That's also a reason to become a teacher: that way, you won't have to leave school;

you can go to class every day. In any case, mass universityeducation is tied to population

growth. It'sa demographic problem. In medieval universitiespeople studied all of their lives,but only a small elite did so then. Now the problem is widespread and we're all accom-

plices. I'mhappy if my son does not pass all of his qualifyingexaminations and continues to

be a student. It is not only the son who is happyto be studying instead of working;the father

is also pleased because he still has his son under his protection and control.

AL/MC:Ifparentsand children, teachers and students, bureaucratsand the unemployed areall happy, there may be no problem ...

Eco:There are several ways to preserve youth; dyes, cosmetics, plasticsurgery.There is also

school. Why should Isee forty-fiveyear old women who want to write a thesis in my classes

at Columbia University?They are never going to teach; they have eight children and a hus-

band to take care of. Ifthey like to study, let them spend the entire day in the library.The

truth is that they are less fond of studying than they are of school. They want to be lifelongstudents; they want to have a fatherwho shouts at them. Universitystudies can be finished in

four years; there is no reason for them to last fourteen.

AL/MC: Do you think that higher education is corrupt? Do you see any solution to the

problem?Eco: Idon't know what solution there may be, since we are all involved. The student is cor-

rupt,but the teacher is more so. Inspite of everything, though, in the middle of these crowds

you always find good students and that is gratifying.Besides, you might be gratefulto the

forty-yearold ladywho comes, hears you, and writes down what you say. You have worked

hard to preparethe class, and you are glad ifsomeone listens to you. It'sa reciprocal corrup-

tion; it is a "paxsceleris."As Foucault teaches us, power is not in one place only: it is in the

guardwho jealously watches the prisoner, in the shop keeper who sells bread to the jailand

is happy that the jail exists. It is these networks that establish and consolidate power.

AL/MC: Let's alk less now about classrooms and more about your books. You have said thatall philosophical works tell a story and that Spinoza's Ethics fascinates you as a narration.

Curiously, Alberto Arbasino has discerned a plot in some of your theoretical works. What

would be the plot of L'Operaaperta or of the Treatiseof General Semiotics?

Eco: You might try to ask Arbasino. He wrote a beautiful essay that compared The Absent

Structure o a novel by JulesVerne. I'm not sure that Iagree with his interpretationbut I en-

joyed it tremendously.

AL/MC: What would be the plot of the Tractatus ogico-philosophicus of Wittgenstein?Or

the plot of Philosophical Investigations??

48



Eco:l believe that the Tractatus ells the story of a mystical journey undertaken to create a

model of the world through language. The Investigations s an adventure novel, while the

Tractatusnarratesan initiationjourney. In the Tractatus,one travels through the world and

finds very strange things: dwarfs, fairies, and monsters. At times there are struggles againstthese beings. Other times, alliances are formed.

AL/MC:In an interview published in Spain (Anagrama,1977), you told LuisPancorbo that

every "critiqueof signs"is also an active intervention in the life of signs. Yourconception of

the critic hardlyfitsthe traditional mage of a theorizer settled comfortably in an ivorytower.

Ifcritical-semioticactivityseems essentially politicalto you, how then do you view the activ-

ity of the writer of fiction?

Eco:There are several differentquestions there. Inthe interview with Pancorbo, I said that

there is no semiotic, critical-descriptiveact which does not change the phenomena that it is

trying to criticize and describe. A trivialexample: the other day while I was talkingwith a

friend, I realized that he has the terrible habit of always using a verbal crutch. He peppers

everything he says with the words "to a certainextent." After a while Ifelt like sayingto him:

"stoprepeating 'to a certain extent,' you make me dizzy." Sayingthat would have produceddefinite effects. On the one hand, my friend would have stopped repeatingthe phrase"toa

certain extent," but on the other he would probably have felt inhibited and would not have

continued talking. Now, if instead of a semiologist, Iwere a physician and Isaid to a patient:

"youhave ulcers,"my telling him so would not cure his stomach. He would still have ulcers.

This is why Isay that a theoretical-criticalpractice of language not only describes what hap-

pens, but also changes the events it describes. The fact of enunciating a theory of language

necessarily provokes a change in the uses of language, which places a great responsibilityon

the critic. If I analyze advertising techniques and say that they generally use such or such a

strategy, I am sure that good advertisingagents would stop coming up with a new strategy

immediately. If Iconstruct the ideal grammarof a certain language, its userswill immediatelytry to speak according to the rules that I have established. A critical-descriptiveanalysis of

language can change the objects which it describes and, consequently, semiotics cannot be

conducted as an abstractdiscipline which is totallydisconnected from life. To put it another

way, semiotics is a forecast that can correct what it has predicted. Itis the opposite of what in

English s called "aself-fulfillingprophecy."The latter warns you: "youare going to stumble,"and you do stumble. After semiotics tells you that you are going to fall, you don't fall anymore. Anything that a semiologist says can have a therapeutic effect. It may be positive; it

may be negative. Every ime you write, you not only emit a series of words; you also carryout a socio-political act, or whatever you wish to call it.

AL/MC:And if instead of writingL'Operaaperta or Lettore n fabula, you write The Name of

the Rose?

Eco: That's another problem. Creative work is not a direct commentary on linguistic prac-tice, but ratheran instrumentthat freely stimulates our interpretationof the world. To return

to my previous example, if Ihad pointed out to my friend that he always repeated the same

phrase, Iwould have forced him to consider the mechanics of hisspeech. If,instead of that, I

had said to him: "Life s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," hardlyknow what his

reply would have been. Perhaps he would have said not!iing, perhaps he would have

answered with another line of verse. More likely, he would have kept on with what he was

saying before my poetic interruption. When you write a work of fiction, you know that

you're going to achieve an effect, but you can't be sure what it'sgoing to be. Itisobvious thatyou write in order to provoke a response, butyou cannot control that response. However, if

you say: "in this situation, one may not use the conjunctive X,"you remain in control of the

situation.

AL/MC: How would you distinguishcritical discourse from artistic discourse? Do you think

that both forms of writingseek power?Eco: Criticaldiscourse attempts to be persuasive discourse, while artisticdiscourse aims fora

different sort of power, more subtle and more deceptive. An artistic text urges you to do

what itsdiscourse wants, but it knows that there are ten differentways to do so. If Imay use a




sexual parallel,criticaldiscourse is a proposition Imake so that a woman will come with me.

Creative discourse would be a propositionthat Imake so that she will go with whomever she

chooses. One is more sadistic than the other. One says:"youare beautiful, I love you, come

with me." The other says: "you are beautiful, I love you, go off with anyone."

AL/MC:Inthe interviewwith LuisPancorbo, you said that semiotics is a model of interpreta-tion that knows itself to be a reflection of reflections, that is to say, semiotics knows that it

provides only "provisionalrepresentations of partialstates of the world."You also confessed

that your greatest problem, after being sure that the world exists, is managing to prove it. If

semiotics cannot prove the world, what instrumentscan do so? Perhapsfiction?

Eco: Istilldon't know what the method is fordemonstratingthe existence of the world, but I

do not believe that this is the purpose of fiction. It seems to me that the goal of a piece of fic-

tion transcends the limits of fiction and enters the domain of ethics. Everynovel has a moral

goal, even Sade'sJustine. By moralgoal Idon't mean learningto love your mother; a novel's

ethical goal may be to make the reader accept the cruelty of nature. Even the novels of

BarbaraCartland have an ethicalgoal;

inthem, you

learn that, in theend, goodness

and

beauty are always rewarded. It'sprobably a false ethical goal; you may not believe it, but

some readers believe it. Fiction always entails myths, and myths always offer us models of

human behavior. It'sthe same mechanism as that of gossip. Why does it interest us to hear

stories about people? I'm not talking about stories about our friends; I'mreferring o the fact

that we'll stop everything to hear stories about people we don't even know. How can one

explain this interest in a portion of mankind that generally leaves us cold in other ways?Because in stories about others we find models of behavior for ourselves. Gossip is a form of

fiction and consequently carries ethical judgments with it.

AL/MC:In a lecture at Columbia University, Jorge LuisBorges also stated that moral prob-

lems were the ones that truly interested him in literature. Isn'tthis insistence on the ethical

goal of literature somewhat dogmatic?Eco:The ethical has to do with human behavior; it's not necessarily relatedto good and evil.

When I read Madame BovaryI ask myself:what would I do in a similarsituation?Would I

trust Leon, who tells me that he loves me? When I read Little Red RidingHood I also ask

myself: if I had been in the forest, what should I have done? It'simpossible for me to refrain

from askingthese questions, Iask them automatically. IfIwere RingoinStagecoach, would I

have escaped with Dallas upon reaching the city, or would I have set out to take revenge on

my enemies? This is what ethics is about. We can't reduce ethics to the Ten Command-

ments; ethics can be reading Justine and following the examples which are found there.

Everywork of fiction is a story of human conduct, and the reader would have to be amonster in order not to see the deeds which the work presents as possible acts of his own. I

believe that every readergets involved in what he reads: he either identifies himself or cries,or he feels superior and laughs. Laughingand crying are both ethical reactions to what one

has read. Evenwhen Isay, "Lookat what a stupid storythis is, in lifethings don't happen that

way; it's a cheap novel,"I am making an ethical argument, an interpretationof the charac-

ters' behavior.

AL/MC:Would you then define ethics with the question, "What would Ido in such a situ-

ation?"

Eco: I define it with Lenin'squestion: "Whatis to be done?"

AL/MC:Isthere any literature hat does not concern itselfwith doing, with ethics, but with

being?Eco:Yes, LaJalousie of Robbe-Grillet.

AL/MC: Don't tease us. That's not a convincing example.Eco: Fiction is always ethical; poetry might be an ontological literature,since poetry is less

concerned with human behavior than with constructing a vision of the world. Since fiction

always narratesactions, it will always be ethical, and the reader of fiction may choose be-

50



tween two paths to follow. Either he thinks that the actions narrated are importantand he

gets involved, or he thinks that they are not, and he laughs.

AL/MC: What might be the minimum requirement that a work must satisfyin order to be a

narrative?

Eco: The principal requirement of narration s that the plot offer alternatives with a certainfrequency, and these alternatives cannot be predetermined. The reader must not know

exactly what decision a character will make. IfItell you that a tribe of Indiansattacks a stage-coach and that rightaway the Seventh Cavalrycomes to the rescue, that isn't narrative.For t

to be narrative, someone on the stagecoach must decide whether to fight or not. The

reader's identification is rooted in the characters'decisions; he either supports them or re-

jects them. The ethical response to a text is rooted in this identification. I do not define the

ethical in the Catholic sense of the term. Itseems to me, rather,that its essence is human

behavior.

AL/MC: Inyour New YorkTimesarticle "How Iwrote The Name of the Rose"you confessed

that you experienced a certain embarrassmentwhen you startedthe novel. You say that youembedded narrativewithin narrative,not only to match historicalsettingwith narrative orm,but also because the layer of narratorsworked as a shield that allowed you to launch your

message "from under the blanket,"as in certain games from your childhood. Could this

equation work: the more reserved or embarrassed the writer,the more narrator'sgames he

plays?Eco: I believe so. Authors like Cervantes, forexample, are bashfulbecause they do not want

to be normal, stupid story tellers.

AL/MC:Inwhich other authors, besides Cervantes and Borges,do you sense some embar-

rassment?In Italo Calvino?Eco: Yes, in Calvino there is a kind of embarrassment, not only in his work, but also in his

life. He filterseverything through humor. I believe that humor is also a form of embarrass-

ment. Now, a nineteenth-century narratorwith little or no sense of embarrassmentwould be

Balzac, and in this century, perhaps Hemingway. There's embarrassment in Dostoevsky'sCrime and Punishment, but less in The BrothersKaramazov.Embarrassment sa mode of nar-

rationlike any other. I'mdrawn to bashfulnarrators, uch as Thomas Mann and JamesJoyce.

AL/MC:Our last question is about libraries.Can you tell us what librariesmean to you?Eco:They are paradise.The great libraries urn me on to such an extent that I rarely requentthem. I'm

talkingabout places like the open stacks of Yale's Sterling Library,which are so

mysterious, so dark, that you could killsomeone in there and it would be impossible to dis-

cover the body afterwards.

AL/MC:What attractsyou about these huge libraries?

Eco:The sense of possibility. Iexperience the joy of an almost infinite possibilityof reading,

although in fact I do not read in libraries,since I feel the compulsion to change from one

book to another.

AL/MC:The possibility is not real, though, since you're never going to be able to read all of

those books...

Eco: Butwhat is paradise?For me it's a place where, like in Borges'ElAleph, you can seeeverything at the same time. You can stay in paradise only five minutes. Longerwould be

unbearable, you could not stand it.

AL/MC:So then, it is a challenge to be in paradise ...

Eco: Yes, paradise is a challenge, a privileged place in which you can stay only for a few

minutes every ten centuries. Libraries ascinate me and that'swhy I run from them. Iftheyensnare me, they drive me crazy.

Translatedby Donald Tuckerand Adelaida Lopez


interview with eco 2

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