Book Review - The Silkworm by J.K. Rowling

 

Source – Live Mint and The Wall Street Journal

It had taken a single reckless tweet to blow the cover of the real identity of author Robert Galbraith, weeks after the first Cormoran Strike mystery, The Cuckoo’s Calling, was published last year. But the best literary minds, it would appear from the second instalment in the series, are ingenious enough to reinforce a conceit that has already been busted, if only by using devices that are loaded with sly, and at times even blunt, symbolism. In The Silkworm, J.K. Rowling, writing for the second time as Galbraith, plays truant with the very image of the androgynous author she had failed to protect after the publication of The Cuckoo’s Calling. She repeatedly invokes gender ambiguity in the new novel to poke fun, often viciously, at male ego as well as female vanity, and eventually turns it into a key vital to the detection of the crime around which the plot turns. One of the characters in The Silkworm is, literally, a hermaphrodite, while another is called Orlando, a reference to the gender-bending protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel. Then there is someone called Epicoene, a nod to Ben Jonson’s protagonist in the play of the same name. Nothing less inventive could be expected of the creator of the Harry Potter series, in which magic and metaphor, wit and wizardry, keep playing off each other, taking the reader on a roller-coaster ride of clarity and confusion. The effect of reading The Silkworm is no less heady, though its plot unfolds with the stately pace of its predecessor. As in The Cuckoo’s Calling, it takes a while for the crime to be committed. Private investigator Strike, the one-legged veteran of the war in Afghanistan and illegitimate offspring of a rock star, stumbles upon the corpse of the very person whose disappearance he is employed to investigate. The case, though not as glamorous as his previous one involving the death of supermodel Lula Landry, is compelling nonetheless, simply for being as macabre as it is. ‘Novelist Owen Quine is found dead, tied up with ropes—à la Fifty Shades Of Grey—on a dining table, set for seven, in a house that he co-owned with a former friend, who also happens to be a writer, though far more successful than him. But it feels like an understatement to call Quine merely dead. For his killer not only takes care to bash him on the head well and truly with a metallic doorstopper, but to also tear open his belly and pull out his guts, before ending with a thorough dousing of the body, and nearly everything else in the house, with the severely corrosive hydrochloric acid. The textbook examples of such murders can frequently be found in 17th and 18th century Jacobean revenge tragedies. Unsurprisingly, lines from the plays of Thomas Dekker and John Webster appear liberally in the epigraphs to most of the 50-odd chapters that comprise The Silkworm. The motive behind this spectacular ritual of violence, it seems, is an incriminating manuscript that Quine had finished, in which he spilled the dirt on more than half of literary London, and which his agent had inadvertently circulated among a couple of publishers, some of whose thinly veiled sexual exploits (or failures in that regard, as the case may be) happen to figure prominently all over the story. Densely allegorical, like a perverse version of 17th century writer John Bunyan’s novel The Pilgrim’s Progress, Quine’s work is called Bombyx Mori, the scientific name of the silkworm, which, as one of the characters explains to Strike, Quine had probably used as a metaphor for the figure of the writer. Like the larva that has to be boiled alive before one can extract the fine silk, the author must “go through agonies to get at the good stuff”. For a remorseless cad and philanderer like Quine, with a gift for poisoning almost all his friendships, such gratuitous cruelty is as seamlessly woven into his art as his life. In Bombyx Mori, Quine seems to have surpassed his imagination for nastiness. He gives his characters names that insinuate, in no uncertain terms, their innermost vices: Phallus Impudicus, Vainglorious, Succuba, Effigy, Epicoene, Tick—the list is a testimony to his prodigal appetite for kink. Much of the detection work involves a close reading of the text, sieving through the imagery for clues embedded in it, in the way A.S. Byatt’s Possession or Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose requires its readers to do. Mischievously, Rowling pulls off quite the same trick as Quine in her own novel, which bears the same title as Quine’s, except that hers is in English, not Latin. With this subtle twist, she doubles the perspective of her narrative, allowing one plot to mirror the other, and leaving the reader to negotiate between the two parallel levels of storytelling: the framing novel (Rowling’s), and the meta-novel (Quine’s) nestled into the core of it. But the triumph of The Silkworm goes beyond its ability to sustain a complex and acutely cerebral structure. Rather, its pleasure is multiplied many times over by Rowling’s ability to humanize her characters, especially the unlikely detective and his assistant. The chemistry between the two seems to have deepened, though not necessarily lost its darker edges, in this book. Having a dead writer at the centre of the plot also allows Rowling to take persistent digs at contemporary publishing—especially at the industry’s craven indulgence of mediocrity for the sake of profit, the triumph of online self-publishing over sound editorial control, and the alacrity with which people tend to take offence at being turned into fodder for somebody else’s fiction. The hint of a celebrity scandal in the plot also allows her to return to one of her favourite bête-noires: the intrusive and insidious operations of modern media. The overwhelming impression is that of publishing being an all-boys’ game, where the rules are set by a bunch of maniacal men—be they writers or editors—feeding off one another’s weaknesses, while women are left on the fringes, fuming with impotent rage. Between these two extremes lurks the figure of the hermaphrodite, the golden mean blessed with the best, and the worst, creative energies of the male and the female, a persona that seems to find a rousing validation in the figure of “Robert Galbraith”.
 

For more information read -  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.

http://centurypublications.co.in/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3507

 

Norma Bouchard - Eco and Popular Culture

 

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 -

http://centurypublications.co.in/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3507

---

[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.

 

Umberto Eco – Narrative Structure of The Name of the Rose for Multiple Interpretations

UmbertoEco’s affinity to the art of detection encourages his reader to think that he is going to present the new version of “Whodunit” within the spectrum called Historical Novel. William of Baskerville, represents the figure of a detective but within the ambit of time period when the discipline of science began to emerge, has to work as per the social and religious situations give him freedom. We come across his disciple Adso (Dr. John Watson of William of Baskerville) gives a chronicle account of the events and debates he witnesses at the Monastery of Melk. We need to give the credit to Adso for his intelligence that enable us to deviate from the schematic plot detection to the to the broader and burning issues of the medieval time period, including the struggle for Hegemony within the Christianity, Heretics, Marginalized people and Inaccessible Knowledge. According to Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “this double focus, one on the detective’s quest for clues and the other on the medieval chronicler’s historical canvas, appears to give the novel a split narrative perspective. This split is seemingly reinforced by the fact that the chronicler is also configured as an artless or inge´nu narrator, who records the events without properly understanding their meaning.” [1] The running of two narrative structures simultaneously exemplifies that Umberto Eco undersigns the fact that apparent reality and the reality ascribed by signs criticize the contradiction between the appearance and reality. The Monastery represents the place of learning and knowledge open to everyone who falls within the normative of it yet the contradiction displays the Truth far from reality, “ this means that Eco’s narrative ends up with two inge´nu narrators, neither of whom can explain the ‘‘meaning’’ of the textual plot to the Reader.”[2]

 

 The double narrative structure of work opens a new window of opportunity for the reader to ascribe his own interpretation to the text. The work is open for a multiple interpretations, depends upon the reader’s interest areas. I would broadly categorize the reader into two groups – Active Readers and Passive Readers. Active Readers underscore the theological and epistemological issues raised in the text, while the Passive Readers look at it as the detective fiction with a formulaic. The openness of the text takes the Active Reader to Medieval time period when the Church was the Supreme – no space for other disciplines or views to challenge it. This inflexible approach to the religions and firmness lead to the split of the Christianity dividing the people into several sects. In fact, the firmness and stringent guidelines emanate new concepts like Heretics defined on the basis of the following of normative structure presented by the Church or distract to create their own. The issue could be studied in a new framework of open work or the Role of the Reader wherein Eco claims that the communication and reception of information is a link between the presenter and receptionist. Respecting the theory of Eco, I now leave you to read the text and open new windows of opportunities for multiple readings of the texts.

---

[1] Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “The Poetics of Pastiche in Eco's Postmodern Detective Novel” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 59–81, 2008

[2] Ibid.

Revisit Linda Hutcheon - - Eco’s Echoes Ironizing the (Post)Modern

LindaHutcheon initiates the argument with an important rather often neglected question – why Umberto Eco introduced renowned personas of the past in his best creations? Is it an allusion to the critical theorists of the present and the past? What is the significance of referring these personas in his works? These are some of the questions that grapple the reader, especially the academicians, who tries to set a connection between the fiction and reality. Linda also acknowledges it, “I want to argue that it is almost impossible not to think of MichelFoucault when reading this novel. But as the puzzlement dissipates, the ironies remain.”[1] Linda shifts the argument to the theoretical praxis in vogue that leads to the transition reflected through allusion – Postmodernism. The new theoretical praxis exemplifies that we are not in the process of creating new rather presenting the old in new form with no originality. The attempt to introduce Foucault’s Pendulum in the museum of Paris clandestinely is a remark against Foucault’s argument that the periodization of history is essentially a reference to the break of the knowledge that preceded the new period and prevailed in the earlier period. However, Eco believes in an alternative approach to the periodization – wherein the periodization mainly presents the old idea in new format but the essence of both new and old are the same. For instance – the beginning of Renaissance, according to Michel Foucault, is the initial phase of science discovery and the replacement of old knowledge of philosophy and truth with a new knowledge of finding the same truth through scientific ways based on observations and experiments to give reasons. The linkage between the pendulum and Michel Foucault, Casaubon of Foucault’sPendulum and Casaubon of Middlemarch is an irony that becomes an imperatives an important part of Postmodernism. Irony may not mean the sarcasm of the old character rather the critique of the old structural knowledge. Even the meaning of irony, “in Greek comedy the character called the eiron was a dissembler, who characteristically spoke in understatement and deliberately pretended to be less intelligent than he was, yet triumphed over the alazon—the self-deceiving and stupid braggart (see in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1957). In most of the modern critical uses of the term "irony/' there remains the root sense of dissembling or hiding what is actually the case; not, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effects”[2] is to show the logical connection between the old and new. Huctcheon also acknowledge when she claims, although this is a novel about connections and resemblances that is structured,o bsessively so, on connections and resemblances, it is irony-the canker or cancer beneath overt resemblance-that makes Eco's plot different from Casaubon's Plan. Without irony, Eco's novel would be an exemplar of hermetic semiosis; with irony, it becomes simultaneously both an examplar and a critique.”[3]

The careful analysis of the title - Eco's Echo Ironizing (Post)Modern is an implied to reference to the ironization of the MODERN.

---

[1] Linda Hutcheon, “Eco’s Echoes Ironizing the (Post)Modern” Diacritics, John Hopkins University, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp 2-16.

[2] M.H Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Heinle & Heinle, 1999.

[3] Linda Hutcheon, “Eco’s Echoes Ironizing the (Post)Modern” Diacritics, John Hopkins University, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp 2-16.

 

Umberto Eco: People Tired of Simple Things

Umberto Eco: 'People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged'

Source:  The Guardian

Report: Stephen Moss

Eco, who will be 80 in January, doesn't look too bad for his ordeal. His rotundity means he sits a little awkwardly in his chair, but he is a lively, playful interviewee, chewing on a small cigar throughout. He gave up smoking them eight years ago, but still likes to have one in his mouth and hopes some of the nicotine gets through. He has a rasping voice and an idiosyncratic take on English. The conversation occasionally breaks down when I use expressions he doesn't quite grasp. He misunderstands when I ask him whether The Prague Cemetery is, as some critics have suggested, a "return to form": for him, form is a sporting rather than a literary term.

Anyway, we battle on. The elephant in our cramped little room is that the new book is not a return to form, whether literary or sporting. Set in the second half of the 19th century and following the fortunes of master forger, murderer and general bad egg Simone Simonini, who manages to have a hand in most of the great events of that period (Italian unification, Franco-Prussian war, Paris Commune, Dreyfus affair), it is a wearying read. In English at least. Perhaps it sparkles in Italian.

 

Whether or not it is a return to form, it is certainly a return to Eco's favourite subject – conspiracies. Simonini is presented as the originator of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early 20th-century fake text that purported to detail a Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination. Following its publication in Russia in 1903, it was widely read and believed, despite being shown to have been plagiarised from fictional sources. Hitler quoted it extensively, and even now its poison circulates. Eco pieces together what little is known of the origins of the text, and offers Simonini, an amoral Italian living in Paris, as the originator of the most toxic of all forgeries.

Conspiracies in general, and the Protocols in particular, have been recurrent themes in Eco's work, notably in his second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, where as a joke three nondescript book editors concoct a grand conspiracy that comes to take over their lives. Why do the Protocols preoccupy him? "As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying. A dog doesn't lie. When it barks, it means there is somebody outside." Animals do not lie; human beings do. "From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history. The most famous and terrible of thos e forgeries is the Protocols."

 

Eco says it is not conspiracies that attract him, but the paranoia that allows them to flourish. "There are many small conspiracies, and most of them are exposed," he says. "But the paranoia of the universal conspiracy is more powerful because it is everlasting. You can never discover it because you don't know who is there. It is a psychological temptation of our species. Karl Popper wrote a beautiful essay on that, in which he said it started with Homer. Everything that happens in Troy was plotted the day before on the top of Olympus by the gods. It's a way not to feel responsible for something. That's why dictatorships use the notion of universal conspiracy as a weapon. For the first 10 years of my life I was educated by fascists at school, and they used a universal conspiracy – that you, the Englishman, the Jews and the capitalists were plotting against the poor Italian people. For Hitler it was the same. And Berlusconi has spent all his electoral campaigns speaking of the double conspiracy of the judges and the communists. There are no more communists around, even if you look for them with a lamp, but for Berlusconi they were there trying to take over."

He probably does not intend to elide Hitler and Berlusconi, but nor is he a fan of Italy's recently departed prime minister. Eco has always been a prominent figure on the political left, and has opposed Berlusconi since his first stint as PM in the mid-1990s. He is pleased that the great partygoer has fallen, but warns against writing him off, suggesting he may try to return after the elections due in 2013.

 

"Berlusconi is a genius in communication," says Eco. "Otherwise he would never have become so rich. From the beginning he identified his target – middle-aged people who watch television. Young people do not watch television; they are on the internet. The people who support Berlusconi are 50- and 60-year-old ladies and retired people, who, in a country with an ageing population, make a powerful electoral force. So even some of his famous blunders may be blunders for me and you, but probably for the provincial 60-year-old lady or gentlemen they are not. His appeal was 'pay less taxes'. When the premier says you are right not to pay taxes, you are pleased."

How could a culture as intellectual and artistic as Italy's have elected such a buffoon? "Berlusconi was strongly anti-intellectual," he says, "and boasted that he hadn't read a novel for 20 years. There was a fear of the intellectual as a critical power, and in this sense there was a clash between Berlusconi and the intellectual world. But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo."

Eco's new book has been attacked by some for regurgitating an antisemitic text, but he argues that the Protocols can easily be found on the internet and that "weak readers" who misunderstand his purpose will be misled elsewhere. "You are not responsible for perverse readings of your book," he says. "Catholic priests said don't give Madame Bovary to a young girl to read because she might be seduced by adultery."

Does it bother him that the half-dozen novels he has produced since The Name of the Rose propelled him to fictional fame in the early 1980s have had a mixed reception? "You are always shocked by how different critics' opinions are," he says. "I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it. I was always defined as too erudite and philosophical, too difficult. Then I wrote a novel that is not erudite at all, that is written in plain language, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and among my novels it is the one that has sold the least. So probably I am writing for masochists. It's only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged."

Eco had a distinguished 30-year career in the academic world, with sidelines making cultural TV programmes and working as an editor in Milan, before The Name of the Rose. Why did he feel the need to add fiction to an already overloaded CV? In part, he says, it was accident. A friend asked him to write a short detective novel for a new series she was preparing. He told her that if he did, it would be set in the middle ages and would have to be 500 pages. That was too big for the proposed series, but the idea had been planted in his mind (or, as he prefers, his belly), and a publishing phenomenon was born. Even without her intervention, however, he implies that he would eventually have written novels. The notion of poisoning a monk appealed to him, and he already had a list of monkish names filed away in his drawer for possible use.

"I have always had a narrative impulse," he says. "I wrote stories and beginnings of novels at the age of 10 or 12. I then satisfied my taste for narrative by writing essays. All my researches have the structure of a whodunit." One of his professors pointed out that even his doctoral thesis on Thomas Aquinas had that structure, with the conclusion teasingly arrived at after a long process of divination. "I recognised he was right, and that I was right, and that research must be done this way. I satisfied my narrative impulse when my kids were small by telling them stories, and then when they were grown up I felt the need to write fiction. It happened to me as it happens to people when they fall in love. 'Why did you fall in love that day, that month, with that person? Are you crazy? Why?' You don't know. It happens."

 

The Name of the Rose made Eco's reputation as a novelist, but it has also proved difficult to match. "Sometimes I say I hate The Name of the Rose," he admits, "because the following books maybe were better. But it happens to many writers. Gabriel García Márquez can write 50 books, but he will be remembered always for Cien Años de Soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude]. Every time I publish a new novel, sales of The Name of the Rose go up. What is the reaction? 'Ah, a new book of Eco. But I have never read The Name of the Rose.' Which, by the way, costs less because it is in paperback." He laughs, as he does frequently. Eco's great virtue is that he is an intellectual who doesn't take himself too seriously. Life, like fiction, is a wonderful game.

It is claimed that he called the film of The Name of the Rose a travesty, but that seems unlikely. He says only that a film cannot do everything a book can. "A book like this is a club sandwich, with turkey, salami, tomato, cheese, lettuce. And the movie is obliged to choose only the lettuce or the cheese, eliminating everything else – the theological side, the political side. It's a nice movie. I was told that a girl entered a bookstore and seeing the books said: 'Oh, they have already made a book out of it.'" More laughter.

 

The Name of the Rose sold – and continues to sell – by the bucketload. It made him rich, famous, sought after. But he chose to carry on teaching at Bologna university, and to keep up his academic work. His bibliography of non-fiction works on language, culture and belief is vast and forbidding. Hidden behind Eco the novelist and Eco the performer is a serious philosopher and literary critic.

It is often said that he constructs his novels out of other books. The Prague Cemetery both explores the 19th-century novels that were plagiarised in the Protocols, and is structured like one. Alexandre Dumas is the presiding spirit, in particular his novel Joseph Balsamo, and intertextuality the name of Eco's fictional game. He has adored books since he was a child, growing up in the town of Alessandria in northern Italy with not very bookish "petit bourgeois" parents but a grandmother who loved reading. He read voraciously and still does. His two libraries, at the homes he shares with his German-born wife Renate Ramge in Milan and Rimini, contain 50,000 books, including 1,200 rare titles.

He has called books "the corridors of the mind" and recently co-wrote an extended love letter to the printed text called This is Not the End of the Book. But that does not make him a digital counter-revolutionary. Indeed, to save having to carry a bag full of books, on this trip he has instead brought along an iPad with 30 titles downloaded. He nevertheless stands by his contention that this is not the end of the book. Reading devices are fine for long journeys and have advantages for reference books, but committed readers will always crave physicality – "not just Peter Pan but my Peter Pan", as he puts it.

The fact that he can accommodate everything from illuminated manuscripts to iPads is typical. He is optimistic, eclectic, eternally young, interested in everything, as at home discoursing on Peanuts as he is on Proust. I ask him how he will be remembered – as novelist, critic or polymath? "I leave it up to you," he says. "Usually a novelist has a longer-lasting life than an academic, unless you are Immanuel Kant or John Locke. Illustrious thinkers of 50 years ago have already been forgotten."

So is he resigned to being remembered for The Name of the Rose rather than his contribution to semiotics? "At the beginning," he says, "I had the impression that my novels had nothing to do with my academic interests. Then I discovered that critics found many connections, and the editors of the Library of Living Philosophers decided that my novels had to be taken into account as a philosophical contribution. So I surrender. I accept the idea that they match. Evidently I am not a schizophrenic."

Read more - Umberto Eco: Rethinking History and Fiction

Umberto Eco: Rethinking of History and Fiction (Century Publication)

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.

The debate on the substitutive nature of history and fiction becomes important when I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is drawn from a manuscript, narrating a story of monastery from the fourteenth century. The manuscript is based on a real incident and Eco employs its content to write the book incorporating real characters and organizations. He sheds light on the problems people faced owing to their religious positions, and how science proved detrimental to religion.  The book exhibits the significance of rational thinking and theory of deduction (primarily used by Sherlock Holmes) to access knowledge. The study has discovered that history is a source of knowledge about the past which uses scientific methods as a detective employs to solve a mystery.  The study also takes into account the theories of history and fiction with a specific reference to borrowing of content and characters from other sources without acknowledgment. Foucault’s Pendulum is a story of three editors who develop a PLAN from second rate manuscripts on historical incidents. A secret organization considers the fictitious PLAN to be real and kills the three editors. They borrow their content on the Templars and other secret organizations from the manuscripts. The study shows that history emerges through multiple texts. Each text has its own significance and essence; each text oozes from the other. The production of text questions the authenticity from which it has evolved. In Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco sets a conversation between past and present then move to the borrowing from the past and its articulation in new framework. 

 

Lastly, the study tries to find answers to important questions – how history resurrects in the present? How past is always present?  What are the mediums of past re-emergence in the present?  These questions are significant in view of the fact that history is written in the present. It lacks the pastness of past rather a present of the past. We get the answers to all these questions in Umberto Eco’s essay – “Towards a New Middle Ages” that explains the past never dies; it revisits the present though in different form. 

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

 

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.

 

The debate on the substitutive nature of history and fiction becomes important when I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is drawn from a manuscript, narrating a story of monastery from the fourteenth century. The manuscript is based on a real incident and Eco employs its content to write the book incorporating real characters and organizations. He sheds light on the problems people faced owing to their religious positions, and how science proved detrimental to religion. The book exhibits the significance of rational thinking and theory of deduction (primarily used by Sherlock Holmes) to access knowledge. The study has discovered that history is a source of knowledge about the past which uses scientific methods as a detective employs to solve a mystery. The study also takes into account the theories of history and fiction with a specific reference to borrowing of content and characters from other sources without acknowledgment. Foucault’s Pendulum is a story of three editors who develop a PLAN from second rate manuscripts on historical incidents. A secret organization considers the fictitious PLAN to be real and kills the three editors. They borrow their content on the Templars and other secret organizations from the manuscripts. The study shows that history emerges through multiple texts. Each text has its own significance and essence; each text oozes from the other. The production of text questions the authenticity from which it has evolved. In Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco sets a conversation between past and present then move to the borrowing from the past and its articulation in new framework.

 Lastly, the book tries to find answers to important questions – how history resurrects in the present? How past is always present? What are the mediums of past re-emergence in the present? These questions are significant in view of the fact that history is written in the present. It lacks the pastness of past rather a present of the past. We get the answers to all these questions in Umberto Eco’s essay – “Towards a New Middle Ages” that explains the past never dies; it revisits the present though in different form.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author works in the capacity of an Assistant Professor (Adhoc) at Bharati College University of Delhi, India. His research interest areas are – Postmodernism, History and Fiction, Cultural Studies, and Crime and Detection.

 

For More Information – visit

http://centurypublications.co.in/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3507Umberto Eco: Rethinking of History and Fiction (Century Publication)

Foucault's Pendulum - An Insight

The story of Foucault's Pendulum is of three friends, named Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon, who work for a publisher in Milan. They get to read manuscripts about occult conspiracy theories after which they decide to invent their own conspiracy for fun. They call this satirical intellectual game "The Plan".

 Diotallevi, Belbo and Casaubon engage themselves deeply into The Plan, they even not remember that it is a game. When people learn about The Plan, they take it seriously. Belbo becomes the target of a very real secret organization that believes he has the key to the lost treasure of the Knights Templar.

The main plot comprises of a number of sub-plots leading to the formation of “The Plan.” For instance -the Foucault pendulum at the Musée des arts et métiers in Paris plays a major part in the novel.

The book opens with the narrator, Casaubon, who hides in fear after closing time in the Parisian technical museum Musée des Arts et Métiers. The name Casaubon refers to classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, and a scholar character in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Eco’s Casaubon believes that the members of a secret organization have kidnapped Belbo and are now after him. Most of the novel is then told in flashback as Casaubon waits in the museum.

 Then, we enter the past of Casaubon when he was a student in 1970s at Milan. He had been working on a thesis on the history of the Knights Templar. In this period, he met Belbo who worked in the position of an editor in a publishing house. Belbo invited Casaubon to look at the manuscript of a supposedly non-fiction book about the Templars. There, Casaubon met Belbo's colleague Diotallevi, a cabalist.

 The book, by a Colonel Ardenti, claims that a hidden coded manuscript has revealed a secret plan of the medieval Templars to take over the world. This supposed conspiracy is meant as revenge for the deaths of the Templar leaders when their order was disbanded by the King of France. Ardenti postulates that the Templars were the guardians of a secret treasure, perhaps the Holy Grail of legend, which he suspects was a radioactive energy source. As per Ardenti's theory, when the French monarchy and the Catholic Church separated the Templars for heresy, some knights escaped and established groups throughout the world. These groups meet at regular intervals at different places to pass on information about the Grail. At last, the groups will reunite to rediscover the Grail's location and achieve world domination. Ardenti did some calculations, according to which, the Templars should have taken over the world in 1944; evidently the plan has been interrupted.

The book takes us to different places deals with a number of issues as the plot moves ahead. The conspiracy gets more complex and people of the secret organization begin to think that the THE PLAN indeed true. In the middle of the book, you will find that how the three editors use the historical events of great importance to create THE PLAN. The role of computer and permutation and combination is also highlighted.

At the end of the book, we meet Casaubon who delved deeply into the past sitting in the museum. It is unclear by this point how reliable a narrator Casaubon has been, and to what extent he has been inventing, or deceived by, conspiracy theories.

To understand, some of the theoretical issues highlighted in the book, especially, the character Casaubon, Production of knowledge through trash, replacement of old knowledge with new knowledge, read some critical books and articles. One of such book - Umberto Eco : Rethinking of History and Fiction deeply study of these issues like –

(1)    How the character of Casaubon of Eco resemble to the Casaubon of Middlemarch?

(2)    What are the similarities between THE PLAN and MYTHOLOGIES of Middlemarch?

(3)    How the three editors create multiple histories?

(4)    What are the objectives behind the creation of histories?

(5)    What is the relevance of multiple histories when the book was published?

For more information, visit – Umberto Eco: Rethinking History and Fiction

http://centurypublications.co.in/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3507