- Ibid. This book is not the same as The Role of the Reader, which is a translation into English of a variety of earlier essays; it does however extend and develop the first chapter of the English book.
systems that constitute culture (p. 297). By describing the structure of these sign systems in their totality and the structure of the messages generated from them, semiotics can enable us to see how messages can manipulate and distort our knowledge of the world, and it is in this sense that it is a form of «social criticism» and «social practice»(p. 298). As Eco says in a note (p. 312), «Semiotics helps us to analyze different ideological choices; it does not help us to choose.» It serves the cause of social and cultural awareness and provides a basis for political action, but it does not itself provide instructions as to the kind of political action one should take. Like his earlier work on mass communications, Eco’s semiotics is associated with a democratic, pluralistic attitude to politics and culture. It means in particular a hostility to any fixed system of thought or belief, since any such system must necessarily misrepresent the real nature of our knowledge of the world.
It should be clear, therefore, that over and above a personal urge toward system there were powerful intellectual reasons of a much more specific kind for Eco’s interest in semiotic theory. Semiotics provided him with concepts and principles that refined and expanded the ideas of his earlier works; it united them within a single theoretical framework giving an enviable sense of clarity, confidence, and purpose to the work of cultural criticism, which he regards as the intellectual’s task. It is true that the claims Eco makes about semiotic theory’s future academic role do seem rather inflated. Semiotics in general—and Eco’s work in particular—has served an extremely valuable purpose by bringing to the different disciplines a greater awareness of the nature and scope of processes of communication, and by encouraging the interdisciplinary movement of ideas and methods.
But Eco’s imperialistic hope that most of the arts and social sciences will eventually be united within a comprehensive semiotic theory seems to ignore both the practical realities of the academic world, and the necessarily openended and approximative nature of theoretical work in many of these subjects. This last criticism, however, is directed more at Eco’s conception of semiotic theory as a subject than at his conception of his own contribution to it. He believes far too strongly in the value of dissent and discussion, he has been far too actively engaged in the revision of his own past work, and he is far too aware of the limits of human knowledge, to regard the ideas he proposes as anything other than tentative and provisional, as workinprogress and as part of a continuing public debate.
I have so far concentrated on the theoretical side of Eco’s writing. However, much of it has been very far from theoretical in character, although it has been to a significant extent inspired by his theoretical concerns. Four of his books’s are collections of articles of a more or less journalistic kind, originally published in dailies or weeklies such as the Corriere della Sera, Il Manifesto, and L’Espresso, as well as in more intellectual or artistic periodicals like Quindici and Ii Verri. Before he became famous as a novelist, Eco was already widely known in Italy as a journalist. Unlike the greater part of his theoretical writings, Eco’s journalism is often extremely funny; indeed. humor is a property to which he attaches considerable importance.
As well as a number of parodies, Diario minimo (1963) contains the wellknown «Elogio di Franti» (In praise of Franti), written in 1962. a celebration of the villain of Edmondo De Amicis’s sentimental and moralistic schoolboy novel Cuore. The infamous Franti, who respects nothing and laughs at everything including his dying mother, is a model of evil for De Amicis’s schoolboy narrator, but for Eco his smile is better seen as a healthy assault on the dominant social and cultural order. Laughter, Eco says, is the «instrument with which the secret innovator places in doubt that which society holds to be good» (p. 94). and such an instrument is clearly, for Eco, an important one. This view of laughter underlies much of Eco’s journalism, insofar as its humor or wit is usually directed at objects of a wholly serious kind, objects which for the most part belong to the areas of interest explored in his more academic studies.
Most of the articles in the three later journalistic collections were written between the midsixties and the early eighties, and can in a sense be described as practical extensions of Eco’s semiotic theory. This is not to say that his arguments are conducted at a high level of theoretical sophistication, or that he draws to a conspicuous extent
- Diario minim° (Milan: MonciadorL 1963), II costume di casa (Milan: Bompiani. 1973), Dalla periferia dell’impero (Milan: Bompiani, 1977), and Sette anni di desiderio
Bompiani, 1983). A selection of the work in these books has been published in English as Travels in Hyperreality (London: Picador, 1987), formerly Faith in Fakes (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1986).
on scientific notions that he himself has elaborated; the theoretical work seems merely to have prescribed the area in which for the most part he has worked as a journalist, and provides his journalism with certain simple general principles and simple conceptual tools. Between them the later collections cover a wide variety of topics, almost all of which are semiotic in the broad sense that they concern modes of communication or signification. A number of articles deal with aspects of modern art or Kitsch; others look at forms of popular entertainment, political debates and criminal cases, comics, films, advertising, the press, television and radio, and various public events. All of them are highly topical, or were when they were written, and all of them participate to a greater or lesser extent in a common undertaking, what Eco calls (in 11 costume di casa, p. 251) the «clarification of the contemporary world.»
This means analyzing the ideological implications of political, social, and cultural products and events through a «critical, rational, and conscious reading» of their meaning (Dalla penferia p. 235); laying bare the confusion, mystification, and manipulation to which the contemporary public is subjected; inculcating in readers a constant attitude of healthy suspicion (diffidenza). Eco sees himself engaged in a form of permanent semiological guerrilla warfare (Travels in Hyperreality, pp. 135144) against the mass media and political power, in the cause of an openminded, tolerant awareness of the complexities, ambiguities, and nuances in life.
Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose is a suitable topic on which to end this introduction. The book cannot properly be termed an open work—in his Postscript to it Eco describes it instead as «postmodernistic» is—but it contains, in varying forms, most of the major themes of his work, and shows very clearly how far the ideas and concerns of his presemiotic writings have continued to determine his thinking. At the most obvious level it is a return to his original medievalist interests. The measured succession of the monastic life he describes, the geometric layout of the buildings in which it is set, and the striking image of the library, with its mazelike structure and the initially incomprehensible but actually intri
Postscrip. to The Name of the Rose (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jo)
care and highly organized classification of its books, all can be seen as a nostalgic material correlative of the ordered system of medieval scholastic thought, which Eco initially adhered to and then abandoned early in his career. The connections between the novel and Eco’s subsequent, more modem interests are less obvious but, to my mind, equally striking. I say «to my mind» especially because, even if the novel is not an open work, Eco nonetheless insists, in his Postscript, that it is capable of a number of interpretations, none of which should be regarded as definitive.
At the very start of Eco’s Postscript the connection is made clear between the novel’s title and the principle of unlimited semiosis, although the point is not spelled out. The reference to the rose in the Latin hexameter with which the narrative ends («The former rose survives in its name; bare names are what we have») seems to assert for Eco the unbridgeable gap between the world of signs and the world of things. On the other hand, there is also, clearly, a contrast between the picture of instability, disorder, and incomprehensibility offered by Eco’s view of semiotics in particular and knowledge in general, and the stable, ordered world of the monastery in which the story is set. Eco himself points out in the Postscript that the labyrinth of the monastery library is not the same as the rhizomelike labyrinth or net of the encyclopedia. Far from permitting an infinite variety of possible connections, it is a labyrinth through which there is only one path—a material image, we may take it, of the intellectual world of the books it contains and the monastic community it serves. We can read the burning down of the library at the end of the novel as
