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.
