Umberto Eco
The year 1932 was a turbulent time for Italians and Europe overall. Mussolini had a stranglehold on Italian society while Hitler and Franco reigned in Germany and Spain. Italian artists were careful not to write or create anything subversive and workers struggled in spite of the meager assistance from the fascist cooperatives created to protect their rights. On January 5 Umberto Eco took his first breaths of Italian air. He was born in the small town of Alessandria in the province of Piedmont; a town involved in the manufacturing business dominated by the Borsalino hat company. Piedmont is a mountainous area that has had more influence from the French culture than that of Italy. Regarding this cultural influence on his writing and his perspective on the Piedmont area Eco states the following: \r\nThe Piedmontese are the least Italian of the Italians -- not passionate, not excited, no fire. There is a strong French influence, a mountain culture. Remember that Piedmont is the only part of Italy that remained independent for the last 1,000 years. Certain elements remain as the basis of my world vision: a skepticism and an aversion to rhetoric. Never to exaggerate, never to make bombastic assertions. (Eberstadt) \r\nUmberto Eco speaks five languages fluently and one can see his comfort with classical Greek and Latin can be seen in his writings -- both academic and fiction. He is an accomplished scholar who has earned thirteen honorary doctorates and many government honors. I have provided a list of all these as an appendix.\r\nEco is an acronym for ex caelis oblatus which means ‘offered by the heavens'. Indeed his work and his insight are gifts of great power and importance to society. His father, Giulio, was an accountant before the government called upon him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. It was during this time that he watched the struggle between fascists and partisans saying the action was "like a small Western. Those hills in my memory are the theater of military operations that I witnessed directly, aged twelve, thirteen." (Eberstadt) There was an undeniable mixture of emotions -- from excitement of action to regret of the inability to participate -- for Eco regarding this scene. One can see these emotions expressed in the formation of a semi-autobiographical framework in parts of Foucault's Pendulum. He entered the University of Turin with intentions to pursue a law degree. However it did not take very long for him to abandon this course of study in favor of medieval philosophy and literature. He earned his doctorate of philosophy in 1954, completing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas.\r\n\r\nHe began his post doctorate work in the field of journalism and accepted a position as Editor for Cultural Programs at RAI in Milan. This gave him a first-hand look at society through the eyes of the monopolized and government controlled media. This control was primarily from the Christian Democratic party which had control in the parliament. RAI continued to be a monopoly until the mid-seventies. Sassoon explains the role of the media in his book Contemporary Italy saying: \r\n\r\nThe rest of broadcasting was in the hands of cautious producers who were left fairly free provided their output did not offend Catholic values (which caused problems with variety shows). (p.164) \r\nA group of avant-garde artists -- painters, musicians, writers -- that he had befriended at RAI became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956 Il Problema Estetico di San Tommaso , which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater.\r\nThe original translation of The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas into English was in 1988. Eco's examination of the theory of beauty and perception renders a sensitive, yet critical perspective to the societal applications therein. He compares Aquinas to Dante and creates connections between medieval aesthetics and that of contemporary structures. \r\n\r\nIn 1959 Umberto Eco lost his job at RAI. This did not bother Eco. Instead he began to concentrate more on his writings and lectures. He published his second book, Sviluppo dell'estetico Medievale, which established Eco as a formidable thinker in medievalism and proved his literary worth to his father. During this year Eco became the nonfiction senior editor of Casa Editrice Bompiani in Milan. This was also the year in which he began his column in Il Verri called "Diario Minimo". This brought Eco's opinions and theories about linguistics and societal realities into the homes of Italians. It was during his writing of these columns that his focus began to shift and he started developing his ideas on semiotics. In 1962, he published Opera Aperta (The Open Work) and in September of that year married his German love Renate Ramge, who worked as an art instructor. The Open Work provides a continuing debate in culture and the arts, and the importance of the relationship between reader and text.\r\n\r\nEco's academic writings focus on Semiotics and its impact on society. He has researched societies from medieval times to the present and has studied the connections between language, symbols and societal development. In addition to the two previously mentioned works, some of his other academic endeavors include Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1959), Travels in Hyperreality (1967), Theory of Semiotics (1973), The Role of the Reader (1979), Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), The Limits of Interpretation (1990), Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992), The Search for the Perfect Language (1993). Two of his collections of essays are entitled Misreadings (1963) and Travels with a Salmon and Other Essays (1992). Misreadings is a collection of Eco's columns in the Italian magazine Il Verri. These essays are full of literary jabs at art, science, society and the overinflated opinions humans tend to hold about their own understanding of themselves and the world they live in. They are social commentary of the society in which he lives.\r\n\r\nIn 1996 Eco wrote two children's books, The Bomb and the General and The Three Astronauts. Published during a decade of turmoil and change throughout the world, The Three Astronauts shows three men from three different countries (The United States, Russia and China) that all land on planet Mars simultaneously. It is a story of their learning that their differences are inconsequential and that their solidarity is the only way to survive in this new world. Eco brings the turbulence of the political world into the simplicity of a child's reality. The simplicity of the story makes us realize how petty and insignificant are our own opinions and ultimately our own lives.\r\n\r\nFrom 1962 until the late seventies Eco concentrated on developing his theory of semiotics. In 1965 Eco was elected Professor of Visual Communications in Florence and in 1966 he moved to Milan and accepted a position as a Professor of Semiotics at Milan Polytechnic. His academic interests began to shift toward cultural studies and he began investigating the role of language and literature on society as well as society's influence on literature and language. Eco's own comments on academics are contradictory, yet obscure enough to be indicative of the essence of Eco. In one interview he stated: \r\n\r\n[learning demands] stubborn incuriosity. Galileo appeared curious, but there were many subject matters he had simply cut away. According to Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes knew everything about chemistry, but he still believed the sun turned around the earth. In order to be so perceptive about the meaning of a spot on someone's shoe, you have to ignore the solar system. As for my own incuriousities, I am so uninterested in them that I do not even know they exist. (Eberstadt) \r\nEco's obscure explanation of academia is indicative of his work overall. Eco's interest in language may come from the diversity of language that exists in Italy. Local dialects were what most people used in their daily lives, so the development of a national language was a curiosity. Some claim that Dante was influential in this process, as he was the first writer to publish in Italian. This is an example of the interdependence of language, culture and society, Eco's principle body of investigation. The development of language is explained in Forgacs' book Italian Cultural Studies: \r\n. . .in 1945, writers continued to face a linguistic situation where the pervasive use of dialect as a medium to talk about everyday matters by the literate and the non-literate alike meant that the written language remained peculiarly literary, more suited to pastoral life in Arcadia than peasant life in Agrigento. (p.250) \r\nThese were the linguistical barriers that interested Eco. As the situation had not changed too drastically by the fifties and sixties, they also served as the impetus of his academic career in linguistical studies and semiotics. In 1971 the University of Bologna offered Eco the position of First Professor of Semiotics. The remainder of the seventies saw numerous publications on a fully developed theory of semiotics by Eco. In 1974 he organized the International Association for Semiotic Studies, thereby solidifying his reputation as a semiotician.\r\nAs the decade of the seventies caused great changes in Italian society, so it changed the focus of Eco's writings. He turned his energies to the writing of fiction novels, surprising fellow academics throughout Italy and Europe. Within the next twenty years, starting in 1978, he would publish three fictional novels : The Name of the Rose (1980), Foucault's Pendulum (1988), and The Island of the Day Before (1994). All three would be translated into many languages and establish Umberto Eco as a reputable fiction writer on an international level. A French director transformed The Name of the Rose into a movie thereby bringing the name Umberto Eco into the homes of movie goers everywhere. \r\n\r\nMixing societal realities with his writing continued during this time. Parts of Foucault's Pendulum are actually excerpts from a novel written by Benito Mussolini about an evil monk in a monastery. Also in Foucault's Pendulum is the notion of conspiracy; ironic since Italian politics in the early nineties suffered from the discovery of governmental conspiracies on a grand scale. Perhaps there was a bit of premonition on Eco's part when he said, "I have always been fascinated by the idea of conspiracy, which doesn't hold only in the political world but also sometimes in literary interpretation." (Goode). Here one senses some bitterness about the control and deceit of the Italian fascist movement and perhaps even of the current situation in which Goode took this statement. Widespread political conspiracy and corruption would dismantle Italian politics within the next four years.\r\n\r\nUmberto Eco has shown his society a new perspective on language and his society has shown him the complexity and development that exists within Italy's borders. His investigations into the dynamics of language and subsequently its role in society has brought a new perspective on interpretation -- both of literature and reality.