The Open Work, Umberto Eco
The Open Work
Contents
Introduction by David Robey
I. The Poetics of the Open Work
II. Analysis of Poetic Language
III. Openness, Information, Communication
IV. The Open Work in the Visual Arts
V. Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics
VI. Form as Social Commitment
VII. Form and Interpretation in Luigi Pareyson’s Aesthetics
VIII. Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art
IX. The Structure of Bad Taste
X. Series and Structure
XI The Death of the Gruppo 63
Notes
Index
Introduction by David Robey
Umberto Eco’s first published book was the dissertation he wrote at the University of Turin, on problems of aesthetics in the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas.’ His first novel, published twentyfour years later in 198o, continues this early interest in the high Middle Ages. As so many readers of The Name of the Rose can testify, few, if any, works of fiction have brought the cultural and intellectual world of this period, or of any other period, so successfully to life. But medieval studies have been only a minor if persistent interest in Eco’s work as a whole. Since he wrote his dissertation, his remarkable energies have been mainly directed at the problems and issues of the present: modern art and modern culture, mass communications, and the discipline of semiotics.
This book collects for the first time in English Eco’s major «presemiotic» writings on modern literature and art—writings, that is, which predate the publication in 1968 of his first semiotic or semiological book (the terms «semiotics» and «semiology» can be used interchangeably), La struttura assente (The absent structure). Most of them are taken from one or more of the many editions of
- Il problema estetico in San Tommaso (Turin, 1956); now revised by the author and recently translated into English as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Much of this introduction appeared in my chapter on Umberto Eco in M. Caesar and P. Hainsworth, eds., Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy (Leamington Spa, England: Berg Publishers, 1984), pp. 6387. Readers are referred to this volume for further information on the literary context of Eco’s writing, and especially to the chapter by C. Wagstaff, «The NeoAvantgarde.» I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint parts of my chapter here. Some of the material was also previously published in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
Opera aperta (The open work), published in 1962, the first of Eco’s books on a modern topic and the work with which he made his name in Italy. Two chapters of the present volume were originally written after Eco’s conversion to semiotics. The first, «The Death of the Gruppo 63,» is included here because it deals with an artistic movement with which Eco became closely associated immediately after the publication of Opera aperta. The other, «Series and Structure,» is of particular interest because it deals with the relationship between the poetics of the «open work» and the structuralist theory whichwasthe starting point of Eco’s semiotics.
Since Opera aperta first appeared, Eco’s thinking has developed in a great many ways. But, as we shall see, there is a substantial and striking continuity between his early and his later writings. More important in the present connection, there is a great deal in Opera aperta and in Eco’s writings of the same period that has not been superseded in his subsequent development, and that remains of considerable relevance and interest. Opera aperta in particular is still a significant work, both on account of the enduring historical usefulnessof itsconcept of «openness,»and because of the striking wayin which it anticipates two of the major themes of contemporary literary theory from the midsixties onward: the insistence on the element of multiplicity, plurality, or polysemy in art, and the emphasis on the role of the reader, on literary interpretation and response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions the book raises, and the answers it gives, are very much part of the continuing contemporary debate on literature, art, and cultureingeneral.
Opera aperta is a polemical book, in marked conflict with the Crocean aesthetics that dominated the Italian academic world in the early sixties. There are a great many references to Croce in the chapters that follow, testifying to the strength of his philosophical Crocinfluence on thinkers of Eco’s generation; indeed, the hegemony e exercised over Italian intellectual life throughout the Fascist period and for the first two postwar decades is probably without parallel in modem European history. The problematic concept of pure intuition/expression, which constitutes the foundation of Crocean aesthetics, is something we need not consider here, bur some of the consequences it entails are worth recalling if we want to understand Opera aperta in its original context.’
Art for Croce was a purely mental phenomenon that could be communicated directly from the mind of the artist to that of the reader, viewer, or listener. The intuition/expression which constituted the essence of the work of art was thus an unchanging entity; it also necessarily possessed unity, which Croce tended to speak of as a dominant lyrical feeling or sentiment. The material medium of the artistic work was of no real significance; it merely served as a stimulus to enable the reader to reproduce in him or herself the artist’s original intuition. Equally, the material historical circumstances in which the artist lived, the artist’s biography, the artist’s intentions—all were irrelevant to the proper understanding of the work, since they were the concern of human faculties quite distinct from those that generated artistic expression. To all of these principles, Opera aperta is completely and radically opposed.
Opera aperta arose partly out of Eco’s work on general questions of aesthetics, which was strongly influenced by the antiCrocean, though still idealist, philosophy of his mentor at the University of Turin, Luigi Pareyson, the subject of Chapter 7 (unless otherwise specified, references to chapters and pages are to those in the present volume). But the immediate stimulus for writing it came from his contacts with avantgarde artists, together with his study of the work of James Joyce, a writer in whom he had a particular personal interest. In fact, the book has the air of a theoretical manifesto for certain kinds of avantgarde art; for the Gruppo 63 (see Chapter 1 I), which was formed in the year after its publication and of which Eco himself became a member, it effectively served as such.
In Opera aperta the idea of the open work serves to explain and justify the apparently radical difference in character between modern and traditional art. The idea is illustrated in its most extreme form by what Eco calls «works in motion» (opere in movimento); he cites (Chapter i) the aleatory music of Stockhausen, Berio, and Pousseur, Calder’s mobiles, and Mallarme’s Livre. What such works have in common is the artist’s decision to leave the arrangement of some of their constituents either to the public or to chance, thus giving them not a single definitive order but a multiplicity of
- For an introduction to Croce’s work, see his Breviario di estetica (Bari: Laterza, 1951; orig. pub. 1913), tr. as The Essence of Aesthetic (London: Heinemann, 1921).
possible orders; if Mallarm÷ had ever finished his Litre, for instance, the reader would have been left, at least up to a point, to arrange its pages for him or herself in a variety of different sequences. Works of this kind are for the most part of recent origin, evidently, and even today are very much the exception rather than the rule. Eco’s point, however, is that the intention behind them is fundamentally similar to the intention behind a great deal of modern art since the Symbolist movement at the end of the nineteenth century.
Traditional or «classical» art. Eco argues, was in an essential sense unambiguous. It could give rise to various responses, but its nature was such as to channel these responses in a particular direction; for readers, viewers, and listeners there was in general only one way of understanding what a text was about, what a painting or sculpture stood for, what the tune was of a piece of music. Much modem art, on the other hand, is deliberately and systematically ambiguous. A text like Finnegans Wake, for Eco the exemplary modern open work, cannot be said to be about a particular subject; a great variety of potential meanings coexist in it, and none can be said to be the main or dominant one. The text presents the reader with a «field’ of possibilities and leaves it in large part to him or her to decide what approach to take. The same can be said, Eco argues, of many other modem texts that are less radically avantgarde than the Wake—for instance, Symbolist poems, Brecht’s plays, Kafka’s novels.
This is where the analogy with works like Mallarrne’s Livre obtains: just as Mallarme’s reader would have arranged the pages of the book in a number of different sequences, so the reader of the Wake perceives a number of different patterns of meaning in Joyce’s language. In the Lure it is the material form that is open, whereas in the Wake it is the semantic content; but in each case, according to Eco, the reader is in substantially the same position, because in each case he or she moves freely amid a multiplicity of different interpretations.
The same analogy obtains, he argues, between abstract visual art and mobiles; and between the aleatory music of Stockhausen, Berio, or Pousseur and the serial music of a composer like Webem (see particularly Chapter to). All these characteristically modern forms of art are said by Eco to mark a radical shift in the relationship between artist and public, by requiring of the public
a much greater
