source - New Essays on Umberto Eco edited by Peter Bondanella
Umberto Eco has
exhibited great devotion to the high canon of Western literature and to popular
literature. Eco has produced a significant proportion of works which can be look
at the transition of in the people perception on the aesthetic as well as the
populist aspect of low-brow literature. The evaluation of popular culture
artifacts reveals that the division of high culture and low culture deeply
rooted and openly admitted in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of
twentieth century “reflect the larger epistemological changes that ensued when
the resistance to commercialized mass culture on the part of an elitist,
aristocratic strand of modern art theory gave way to a postmodernist blurring
of the divide between different types of discourses.”[1] Bouchard
believes that Eco from the beginning of his career had a strong opinion that
high and low art are complementary and interchangeable although a strong
opinion of escapism regarded by elitist. What Eco has achieved through his
fictional and non-fictional works is to firmly establish the Postmodern concept
of “Intertextuality” – Nothing is New - to show that the writers or critics
only innovate from the already existed texts. Bouchard also admit that the
bibliography of Umberto Eco, “Andreas Huyssen calls the “Great Divide”3 and
therefore documents the different positions on popular culture taken by two
very different twentieth-century views on the subject: modern art theory, on
the one hand, with its emphasis on originality, novelty, and innovation; and
postmodern aesthetics, on the other hand, that champions repetition, iteration,
intertextual citation, and replay.”[2] Umberto
Eco remains neutral on the art neither he criticizes that is highbrow in nature
nor valorizes all forms of mass culture. For him, the classics hold as much
significance as the popular art does. For instance, Eco’s publications between Apocalyptic
and Integrated Intellectuals (1964) and Invernizio, Serao, Liala (1979) reflect
a predominantly modernist approach to culture. How do we distinguish between
Modernism and Postmodernism is a contentious issue but critics have agreed on
certain parameters that popular art forms could be defined as products of a
bourgeois, capitalist- driven culture that seeks to provide the public with
imaginary resolutions to real, social contradictions. Eco has examined the
works “within two categories: popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels;
and various forms of mass communication widespread in twentieth-century
culture, such as cartoons, songs, television, and films.The first group of
works is discussed in great detail in The Superman of the Masses and in
Invernizio, Serao, Liala.”[3] Bouchard further argues that the working of Eco
on mass media, cartoon and other modes of electronic communications crops from
his belief that “in the course of the twentieth century, the novel’s popular
appeal as a genre diminishes. Narrative migrates into the newer media
of films, television, songs, and cartoons. The analysis of these new forms is
at the center of Apocalyptic and Integrated Intellectuals.”[4] Since
Eco writes in the time period when Postmodernism dominates other forms, his art
is “hybrid incorporation of high- and lowbrow culture in The Name of the Rose and subsequent novels. their author is still
far from relinquishing a desire for originality of vision in both the semantic
and formal structures of his work.”[5]
The Name of the Rose might easily be accused of being the quintessential work
of Kitsch. Bouchard ends the debate on the respective position of both high
culture and low culture each having its own importance in the background of
time period when a specific work is produced.
Norma Bouchard is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Celine, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writers of the 1930s (2000); editor of Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth- Century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema (2005); and co-editor of Umberto Eco’s Alternative: The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation (1998).
Read more - Umberto Eco: Rethinking History and Fiction
Abstract
History give an
access to unknown past through narrative structure scaffolding on facts and
manuscripts drawn from achieves. These manuscripts and detailed accounts corroborate
with ruined archeological sites with inscriptions and arts. Thus, history represents
rational and objective truth that answers to all the queries of people about
the past. What happens when a fiction
writer chooses stories and characters from history? If a fictional story is
based on a historical incident and characters, what is the difference between
fiction and history? Does the reader not find himself cheated? What stand does
the reader take with respect to fiction and history? These questions inform
about the substitutive nature of history and fiction that have infiltrated into
each other territories. Does it really obliterate the difference? The questions
become easier to answer if we define history and fiction in their respective
territories. In fact, neither history is fictitious nor fiction is history;
they do not pose a challenge to each other only inform about narrative
structure and their representation through language.
For more reading, visit -
[1]
Norm Bouchard, “Eco and Popular Culture” ed. Peter Bondanella New Essays on Umberto Eco, Cambridge
University Press. 2009.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
Ibid.
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