Jean-Claude Carriere, Umberto Eco look at the future of books and information in ‘This Is Not the End of the Book’

Source: The Washington Post

By Michael Dirda September 27, 2012

The French don’t have cafes just because they like coffee. They love conversation, philosophical and political arguments, any kind of spirited talk about writing, ideas, culture. For many years, “Apostrophes” — in which noted authors discussed their work for an hour on Friday evenings — was the must-see program on French television. Very much in this Gallic tradition, “This Is Not the End of the Book” allows the American reader a chance to listen in as two smart and well-read men of letters chat about reading, the Internet, book collecting and odd byways of literary and cinematic history. The resulting discussion makes for quick-paced and absorbing intellectual entertainment.

Umberto Eco isn’t, of course, French, but he seems to know the language as well as his native Italian. Not only is he the author of world-renowned novels, starting with “The Name of the Rose,” but he is also a specialist in semiotics, a sometime newspaper columnist and one of the great private collectors of incunabula, that is, the books printed before the 16th century.

In contrast, Jean-Claude Carriere is an eminent cinephile, a former head of the French film school and a frequent script collaborator with movie and stage directors, having worked with Luis Bunuel on “Belle de Jour” and Peter Brook on “The Mahabharata.” He, too, collects very old books and shares with Eco an interest in works about mankind’s follies, delusions and superstitions.

From the beginning of the discussion, and periodically throughout, Eco insists that “the book is like the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be bettered.” No Luddite, however, he confesses that if his house were on fire, he’d save his computer’s hard drive before any of his books because it holds all his writing of the past 30 years. Nonetheless, he insists that we cannot spend all our time reading on a screen — our eyes just won’t take it. I’m not so sure of that, but Eco certainly seems right in noting that the digital revolution has led to more widespread literacy: Just when we thought, in the wake of Marshall McLuhan, that we were becoming “a purely visual civilisation,” the computer returned us “to Gutenberg’s galaxy; from now on, everyone has to read.”

As the conversation ranges on, both men worry about the unreliability of online data: “What the Internet provides,” notes Carriere, “is gross information, with almost no sense of order or hierarchy, and with the sources unchecked. So each of us needs not only to check facts, but also to create meaning.” Eco stresses that we have to learn how “to handle information whose authenticity we can no longer trust.” For Carriere “this tool — which is supposed to be comforting in its delivery of everything and anything — actually plunges us into great confusion.” Moreover, adds Eco, “discussions between people can only take place on the basis of a shared encyclopedia. . . . We expected globalisation to make everyone start thinking alike. What has actually happened is precisely the opposite: globalisation has led to the parcelling up of common experience into different camps.” The scholar-novelist further emphasizes the ephemeral, transient quality of online reading: “As soon as you click onto the next page you forget what you’ve just read, the very thing that has brought you to the page now on your screen.”

“This Is Not the End of the Book” by Jean-Claude Carriere and Umberto Eco (Northwestern University)

Even though these conversations are more than three years old, Carriere does seem to have foreseen the rise of widespread tweeting: “One day soon we will all be informants. Willing informants of a more or less qualified, more or less biased nature, who will also, by the same process, have become inventors, creators of news, every day imagining the world anew. It may come to that: describing the world according to our desires, which we will by then take for reality.”

While Eco usually makes the more profound remarks, Carriere likes to provoke with odd factoids and assertions: “Every great French author from Rabelais to Apollinaire has written at least one pornographic text.” “During the 120 or 130 years between Racine’s Phedre and the Romantics, not a single poem was written in France. Versifiers did of course churn out and publish thousands, if not millions, of lines of verse, but you won’t find a French person today who can quote a single one.” Why was this? Because the 18th century was a neoclassical age: “When you do nothing but apply a set of rules, the elements of surprise, brilliance and inspiration all evaporate.”

Eco then reminds us that a work of art only gradually becomes great. “A masterpiece isn’t a masterpiece until it is well known and has absorbed all the interpretations to which it has given rise, which in turn make it what it is. An unknown masterpiece hasn’t had enough readers, or readings, or interpretations. In that sense, one could say that it was the Talmud that gave rise to the Bible.”

While some of the speculations about the digital age now seem familiar, the conversation itself always conveys that easygoing learnedness so characteristic of the European intellectual. Carriere alludes to the aphoristic witticisms of a Bavarian comic named Karl Valentin: “In the past, even the future was better” and “Everything has been said already, but not yet by everyone.” When Eco mentions that he is constantly learning new things as a defense against Alzheimer’s, Carriere suggests that this preventive may not always work. Eco wryly answers: “In that case I’ll stop learning poems by heart, and start drinking two bottles of whiskey a day. Thanks for giving me hope.” When the pair discuss vanity presses and self-publishing, Eco recalls one Giulio Ser Giacomi “who published his correspondence with Einstein and Pius XII in a huge 1,500-page tome; the book, however, contains only the letters he wrote to both men, because of course neither of them ever replied.”

Taking up the theme of stupidity and superstition, Eco reminisces about a great Italian literary critic widely thought to possess the evil eye and whose company brought bad luck. (Perhaps to ward off the latter, he doesn’t name the critic, almost certainly Mario Praz, author of “The Romantic Agony.”)

Carriere mentions that a film he worked on with Bunuel — “That Obscure Object of Desire” — includes a “direct-action group called the ‘Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus.’ ” Eco shakes his head over an online survey that “proclaimed Quentin Tarantino the greatest director of all time. The people they asked must never have seen Eisenstein, Ford, Welles, Capra, etc.”

Near the close of “This Is Not the End of the Book,” Carriere asks Eco, “Do you really think it’s important to be well educated?” The Italian answers, without shilly-shallying, “I think it’s fundamental.” Knowledge of the past, he reminds us, forms “the basis of every civilisation.” Enough said.

Umberto Eco: 'It's Culture, Not War, That Cements European Identity

'Source: The Guardian & Europa (Jan 26, 2012)

 

Outside Umberto Eco's office window in Milan looms the intimidating mass of Sforzesco castle, a reminder, with its towers and black birds, of various continental wars. Here once stood the 14th-century Castrum Portae Jovis – the Porta di Giove fortress – which was destroyed by the short-lived Aurea Republic of 1447. Between these walls, Leonardo Da Vinci and Donato Bramante once laboured; these very buttresses were conquered by Napoleon. And just beyond the moat – an area now invaded by tourists who have come to visit Michelangelo's La Pietà Rondanini – Marshall Radetzky's Austrian troops bombarded the rioting city in 1848.

"When it comes to the debt crisis," says Eco, "and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't understand anything about the economy, we must remember that it is culture, not war, that cements our [European] identity. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other. Today, we've been at peace for 70 years and no one realises how amazing that is any more. Indeed, the very idea of a war between Spain and France, or Italy and Germany, provokes hilarity. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly. I hope that culture and the [European] market will do the same for us."

Eco sips his coffee, preferring suitably postmodern Nespresso capsules, whereas his German wife, Renate Ramge Eco, defends the traditional Italian coffee pot, the moka. He has just returned to Milan from Paris, where the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, conferred on him the rank of commander, the third rank of the Legion of Honour.

"Those were the hours of France's battle for the AAA rating, but Sarkozy still didn't want to miss it – great. I must admit it was also a moving experience when I was conferred the Dodecaneso Cross in Greece: they hand them out right inside Patmos cave, where St John wrote the Apocalypse," says the writer, with a laugh.

"One of the advantages of living in Europe is that I get birthday greetings from the German president, Wulff, and the Spanish prime minister, Rajoy, neither of whom I know. After being at each other's throats for years in fratricidal wars, we're now all culturally European."

Asked to describe European identity in 2012, Eco says it is widespread but "shallow". "I am using an English word that is not the same as the Italian word superficiale, but which is somewhere between 'surface' and 'deep'. We must change this, before the crisis strips it [Europe] of everything.

"The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business sections of newspapers, yet Erasmus has created the first generation of young Europeans. I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate."

It's an attractive idea, and yet pride in Europe appears to be giving way to populism and hostility within the union. "That's why I said that our [European] identity is 'shallow'. The founding fathers of Europe – Adenauer, De Gasperi and Monnet – may have travelled less. De Gasperi spoke only German because he was born within the Austro-Hungarian empire and didn't have access to the internet to read the foreign press. Their Europe reacted to war and they shared resources to build peace. Now we must work towards building a more profound identity.

"When I proposed at a meeting of EU mayors the idea of also introducing Erasmus for craftsmen and professionals, a Welsh mayor said: 'My citizens would never accept this!' And when I spoke about this a few days ago on English television, I was slapped down by the anchorman, who was worried about the euro crisis, about a supranational Europe and about the technical governments of Papademos in Greece and Monti in Italy who were not 'elected', and are therefore 'undemocratic'.

"How should I have responded? By saying that ours is a government approved by parliament and proposed by a president elected by parliament? By saying that in all democracies there are unelected institutions, such as the Queen of England, and the American supreme court, but that no one defines them as non-democratic?"

Even before the debt crisis, Europe's weak identity – as diagnosed by Eco – was apparant. "[For instance,] when the constitution was rejected in a referendum. The document had been written by politicians; it was impossible for any educated man to participate in the process and it was never discussed with voters. It was also evident when euro banknotes were designed without the usual faces of important men and women – instead, there were just frigid landscapes, as in a De Chirico landscape. Or does the problem [of European identity] go back to God - the fact that the United States becomes ever more religious as Europe becomes even less religious?

"That's the way it is. Back when Pope Wojtyla was still alive, there was much discussion on whether they should accept the European constitution and the continent's Christian roots. Secular people predominated and they did nothing about it. The church protested. There was however a third way, more difficult, but one that would give us strength today.

And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them.

That is precisely how I see its future. As for religion: be careful. Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to supersitition. And many who are non-practising still carry around a little saint card with a picture of Padre Pio in their wallets!"

Father of semiology, scholar of mass culture, author of essays for the elite and global bestsellers – from The Name of the Rose to The Prague Cemetery, Eco has just turned 80. Whenever he gets tired climbing a flight of stairs, he jokes: "Eh, my friend, we're not 70 any more!"

He is no pessimist: "With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China. Europe will never be the United States of Europe, a single country with a common language like the USA – where for a long time English was threatened to be overtaken by German, now overtaken by Spanish.

"We have too many languages and cultures, indeed, the idea of an unique [European] newspaper is for now just a utopia. The web, meanwhile, makes us bump into one another; we may not read Russian but we come across Russian websites and we are made aware of others.

"I still think that there is no longer a disparity between Lisbon and Warsaw, just as there is no disparity between San Francisco and New York. We will remain a federation, but indissoluble."

So whose faces should we print on our banknotes, to remind the world that we are not merely 'shallow' Europeans, but profound? "Perhaps not politicians or the leaders who have divided us – not Cavour or Radetzky, but men of culture who have united us, from Dante to Shakespeare, from Balzac to Rossellini.

"And since Pierre Bayard is right, we know there are books we have yet to read that will help us reflect on cultures different from our own. Little by little: that is how our European identity will become more profound."