As Eco said in the first preface to Opera aperta, contemporary art seeks a solution to this crisis by offering us a «new way of seeing, feeling, understanding, and accepting a universe in which traditional relationships have been shattered and new possibilities of relationship are being laboriously sketched out.»‘ Art is therefore political in its own special way; it produces new knowledge that can serve as a basis for changing the world, but it does not necessarily have an explicitly political content.
Together with «Form as Social Commitment,» Opera aperta contains, if sometimes only in germ, features that are fundamental to Eco’s later semiotic theory: the notion of the special function of art; the sense of living in an age of instability and crisis; the theme of the senselessness and disorder of the modern experience of the world; and at the same time the emphasis on awareness, involvement, and the need for change. The book’s style of thought has remained characteristic as well: a taste for broad, synthesizing generalizations, and a consequent tendency to stress the similarities between concepts and phenomena at the expense of the differences, and on occasion to neglect local problems in the interests of the overall view. In a more specific, personal, and paradoxical way, also, Opera aperta looks forward to Eco’s shift of interest to semiotics.
A large section of the first edition consists of a discussion of the poetics (poetica) ofJames Joyce, which was removed from subsequent editions to be published separately.’ As well as providing further illustration of the main theme of Opera aperta, this discussion points to a clear analogy between Joyce’s artistic development, as Eco sees it, and Eco’s own personal history. What interests him in Joyce is the novelist’s move from a Catholic, Thomist position to the disordered, decentered, anarchic vision of life that seems to characterize Ulysses and Fitmegatis Wake. Yet Eco also finds in Joyce’s mature work a degree of persistence of his youthful faith, a nostalgia for the ordered world of medieval thought that is most notably expressed in the system of symbolic correspondences
- Opera aperta (Milan: Bompiani, 1962),P 9.
- Now published in English as a companion to the present volume: Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages ofJames Joyce (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
underlying the surface chaos of Ulysses; Ulysses, he suggests, is a «reverse Thornist1 summa» (The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, Chapter 2). Similarly as he himself tells us, when Eco began working on his doctoral thesis, he did so in a «spirit of adherence to the religious world of Thomas Aquinas,» a spirit which he then lost as he worked on it (The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, p. i). Yet a nostalgia for the ordered world of medieval thought seems to have remained with him as well, expressing itself not only in occasional excursions to the Middle Ages, culminating with The Name of the Rose, but also, much more indirectly, in his interest in semiotics. For Eco’s semiotic theory has an ordered, comprehensive, rationalist, architectural character that also bears comparison with that of the Thomist summae, though with at least one radical qualification: whereas Saint Thomas’s system is metaphysical, Eco’s very definitely is not; as we shall see, the urge to system and order is displaced by him from the sphere of being to that of method alone.
But between Opera apena and Eco’s first major semiotic text there came another book which pursued a line of interest that has since constituted an important part of Eco’s activities: the study of mass culture and the mass media. Chapter 9 below («The Structure of Bad Taste») is an excerpt from it. Published in 1964, the book had as its title Apocalittici e integrati (Apocalyptic and integrated (intellectuals)), the two terms standing for two opposite attitudes to the mass media and their effect on contemporary culture: the apocalyptic view that culture has been irredeemably debased by the mass media, and that the only proper way to treat these is to disregard them; and the wholly positive view of those who are so well integrated in the modern world that they see the nature and effect of the mass media as necessary and even desirable.
Eco’s own view lies between these two extremes. The mass media, he argues, are such an important feature of modern society as to require the serious attention of intellectuals, and, far from being a necessarily negative influence, they are to be welcomed for providing universal access to cultural experiences previously restricted to an elite. They are not to be accepted as they are, however; the intellectual’s task is to analyze their nature and effect and to seek actively to transform them, by criticizing their deleterious features and pointing the way to the improvement of their cultural content.
What this means in practice is shown by the discussion in Apocalittici e integrati of such things as comic strips, pop songs, and television programs, a discussion which is supplemented by two essays, published the following year, on Eugene Sue’s Mysteres de Paris and on the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming.6 The main purpose of these essays and of the discussion of specific mass media in the book is to lay bare the ideological implications of different forms of popular entertainment, particularly, in the case of the comic strips and the novels, the relationship between ideology and narrative structures.
From the analysis a distinct set of common themes emerges. The kind of entertainment that Eco criticizes, as did Vittorini, is that which is consolatory, in the sense of reaffirming the public’s sense of the essential rightness and permanence of the world in which they live. The great fault of the mass media, for Eco, is to convey a standardized, oversimplified, static, and complacent vision that masks the real complexity of things and implicitly denies the possibility of change.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong, Eco suggests, with pure popular entertainment; all of us feel the need to read a James Bond novel or listen to pop music from time to time. The problem is that for most people bad popular entertainment has come to be a major part of their cultural experience, and its effect has been to exercise a strongly reactionary influence. The solution, therefore, is not to raise popular entertainment to the level of art—Eco is not saying that the public should be fed on a diet of modern open works—but to work for forms of entertainment that are «honest.» This means, on the one hand, entertainment that does not have false artistic pretensions; the concept of Kitsch is discussed at some length in Apocalittici e integrati, in the chapter translated below, and is defined as nonart that aspires to artistic status by borrowing devices from true artworks, devices that automatically cease to be artistic when they are used outside their original «organic» context.
On the other hand, what is more important, «honest» entertainment is that which is ideologically sound, not in the sense of propagating the dogma of a political party, but by virtue of more widely acceptable qualities: because it acknowledges the complexity, the problematic character of the historical circumstances in which we live, because it allows for the possibility of change and serves as a stimulusulus to reflection and criticism, because it generates a sense of ndepen
dence and choice instead of conformism and passivity.
- Now in II superuomo di massa (Milan: Bompiani, 1978), pp. 2767 and 145184; and translated into English in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1979).
EESTI AKADEEMILINE
This should help make clear what kind of political commitment Eco expresses in his writings. The emphasis on change, the hostility to conformism and conservatism must mark him as a man of the left. Yet however he personally may vote, there is no recognizably partypolitical element in his books. This is partly because his intellectual task, as he conceives it, is cultural rather than narrowly political, but more because his values are broadly democratic rather than specifically socialist or communist. In particular, as a writer, he has always kept his distance from the Italian Communist Party.
Opera aperta, with its insistence on the special function of the modem open work, was in conflict with the view of art at that time favored by the Party. In Apocalittici e integrati the emphasis on criticism, debate, and the complexity of things also seems implicitly opposed to the Party line, at least at that period. Eco particularly favors the television discussion program «Tribuna Politica» as a form of «education for democracy» that helped viewers become aware of the «relative» character of politicians’ opinions (Apocalittici e integrati, p. 351); and in his analysis of the Bond novels (The Role of the Reader, p. 162) he argues that the «democratic» man is the one who «recognizes nuances and distinctions and who admits contradictions.» Finally, the themes of disorder and incomprehensibility in Opera aperta, and the arguments about the limitations of system atic worldviews in his later semiotic works again tend to set him apart from mainstream Marxist ideas. Marxism has been an important influence on Eco’s thinking, but this relativism and individualism are major qualifications of his leftwing position.
Eco s shift of interest to semiotics began as he was supervising the translation of Opera aperta into French. He was introduced to the structuralism of Jakobson and LeviStrauss,’ and as a result revised sections of the book along structuralist lines (Chapters 2 and 3 below), as has already been mentioned. This contact with structuralist thought was the main source
