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."

T S Eliot and His religious Views

T. S. Eliot was the most acclaimed poet writing in English in the twentieth century. He is known as the most revolutionary Anglophone literary critic and had claimed the position of the most influential religious
thinker in the Anglican tradition. His social and political vision is contained in all his writings. He has been absorbed and reabsorbed by generations of English and American readers. Eliot set the philosophy of religion on a higher plane—intellectually, spiritually, and stylistically—than has ever been reached by the adherents of the socialist idea. Eliot attempted to shape a philosophy for our times that would be richer and more true to the complexity of human needs than the free-market panaceas that have so often dominated the thinking of conservatives in government. He assigned a central place in his social thinking to high culture. He was a thorough traditionalist in his beliefs but an adventurous modernist in his art, holding artistic modernism and social traditionalism to be different facets of a common enterprise. Modernism in art was, for Eliot, an attempt to salvage and fortify a living artistic tradition in the face of the corruption and decay of popular culture.

Sweeney Among The Nightingales by: T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

        APENECK Sweeney spreads his knees
        Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
        The zebra stripes along his jaw
        Swelling to maculate giraffe.
        
        The circles of the stormy moon
        Slide westward toward the River Plate,
        Death and the Raven drift above
        And Sweeney guards the horned gate.
        
        Gloomy Orion and the Dog
        Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
        The person in the Spanish cape
        Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees
        
        Slips and pulls the table cloth
        Overturns a coffee-cup,
        Reorganized upon the floor
        She yawns and draws a stocking up;
        
        The silent man in mocha brown
        Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
        The waiter brings in oranges
        Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;
        
        The silent vertebrate in brown
        Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
        Rachel née Rabinovitch
        Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;
        
        She and the lady in the cape
        Are suspect, thought to be in league;
        Therefore the man with heavy eyes
        Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,
        
        Leaves the room and reappears
        Outside the window, leaning in,
        Branches of wistaria
        Circumscribe a golden grin;
        
        The host with someone indistinct
        Converses at the door apart,
        The nightingales are singing near
        The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
        
        And sang within the bloody wood
        When Agamemnon cried aloud,
        And let their liquid droppings fall
        To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK by: T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

      

       LET us go then, you and I,

        When the evening is spread out against the sky

        Like a patient etherized upon a table;

        Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

        The muttering retreats

        Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

        And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

        Streets that follow like a tedious argument

        Of insidious intent

        To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

        Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

        

        Let us go and make our visit.

        In the room the women come and go

        Talking of Michelangelo.

        

        The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

        The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

        Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

        Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

        Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

        Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

        And seeing that it was a soft October night,

        Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

        

        And indeed there will be time

        For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

        Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

        There will be time, there will be time

        To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

        There will be time to murder and create,

        And time for all the works and days of hands

        That lift and drop a question on your plate;

        Time for you and time for me,

        And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

        And for a hundred visions and revisions,

        Before the taking of a toast and tea.

        

        In the room the women come and go

        Talking of Michelangelo.

        

        And indeed there will be time

        To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"

        Time to turn back and descend the stair,

        With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--

        (They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!")

        My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

        My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--

        (They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")

        Do I dare

        Disturb the universe?

        In a minute there is time

        For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

        

        For I have known them all already, known them all:

        Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

        I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

        I know the voices dying with a dying fall

        Beneath the music from a farther room.

        So how should I presume?

        

        And I have known the eyes already, known them all--

        The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

        And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

        When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

        Then how should I begin

        To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

        And how should I presume?

        

        And I have known the arms already, known them all--

        Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

        (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

        Is it perfume from a dress

        That makes me so digress?

        Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

        And should I then presume?

        And how should I begin?

        

        Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

        And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

        Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

        

        I should have been a pair of ragged claws

        Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

        

        * * *

        

        And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

        Smoothed by long fingers,

        Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,

        Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

        Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

        Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

        But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

        Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

        I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;

        I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

        And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

        And in short, I was afraid.

        

        And would it have been worth it, after all,

        After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

        Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

        Would it have been worth while,

        To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

        To have squeezed the universe into a ball

        To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

        To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

        Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--

        If one, settling a pillow by her head

        Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;

        That is not it, at all."

        

        And would it have been worth it, after all,

        Would it have been worth while,

        After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

        After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--

        And this, and so much more?--

        It is impossible to say just what I mean!

        But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

        Would it have been worth while

        If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

        And turning toward the window, should say:

        "That is not it at all,

        That is not what I meant, at all."

        

        No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

        Am an attendant lord, one that will do

        To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

        Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

        Deferential, glad to be of use,

        Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

        Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

        At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--

        Almost, at times, the Fool.

        

        I grow old ... I grow old ...

        I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

        

        Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

        I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

        I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

        

        I do not think that they will sing to me.

        

        I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

        Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

        When the wind blows the water white and black.

        We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

        By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

        Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

William Congreve and His Works

William Congreve is one of the known English poets and dramatists of the Restoration period. William Congreve was born on January 24, 1670 in Bardsey, West Yorkshire, England. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin where he met Jonathan Swift. Congreve had a strong attraction towards drama, poetry, literature and the fashionable life that also engulfed the other writer of this age. He wrote comic plays, including The Old Bachelor (1693), Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700). The Old Bachelor is a perfect amalgamation of farce, satire, and Jonsonian comdedy of hurmours which gives an impression of the combination of the Elizabethan and Restoration dramatic framewrok. The witty dialogue and new twist to marriage by the inclusion of lust and amorous elements in the play reflect the obsession of restoration dramatists to mock the middle class and prevailing customs. Love for Love is a new addition to his work without much diversion and focus on the Jonsonian comedy of humours rather comedy of manners. In the play, the protogonist searches new methods to avoid his creditors and to bring back the fortune he has lost. Another main agenda of his efforts to win the love of his mistress. Besides, Love for Love is called the most satirical plays of Congreve.
Congreve coined another famous phrase in Love for Love (1695).
"O fie, miss, you must not kiss and tell."The Way of the World contains almost all the standard situations of the restoration period such as the witty dialogue, amorousness, lust, mockery of social structure, adulteries, and all the usual tension between desire and reputation. His plays could be categorized showing unscrupulous selfishness and the cruel dishonesties vogued at both the social and family levels.

Drama Under the Restoration Period

Restoration period started in 1660 with the accession of Charles II on English throne after the submission of the Puritan government that assumed the control in 1642. With the restoration, the reaction against manner and moral are inevitable. It was all the more voilent owing to the return of Cavaliers who had spent their exile in France. As the Cavaliers return to England, they bring with themselves the French wit and French gallentry. The king, Charles II, was himself indolent sensualist possessed wit. Charles II encouraged an atmosphere of hedonistic loneliness at court. Charles II set the tone for the court wit, if not for all the literature of the period at least certain segment of it, notably dramatic comedy. The amoral wit and hedonism were professed by restoration wit. There was no connection of restoration wit with real life. Besides, the Puritan government stopped the performance of play in September 1642, but there was an occassional surreptitious performances at various theatre after the passing of ordinance of supression. Therefore, it could be said that English theatre had no existence between 1642 and 1660. With the restoration, the theatre was re-established. It was a different theatre playing to different audience. The modern theatre with its movable secenary designed to create a visual image of locale of each scene and artifical light. The audience of the restoration was different and had strong affinity with the geographical and social parameter. The restoration period also represented stylization of deliberatly cultivated upper class ethos. The break with the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre was not as sharp as it seems. There was a great influence of Ben Jonson on the playwrights of this period, particularly the adoption of comedy of humour that attached with moral values. The first accomplished follower of Jonson tradition in his plays during the restoration age was Sir George Etherage. Francis Beaumont and Fletcher, who began the process of aerating of Jonson with more flippant kind of wit and a less moral tone. The other playwrights who contributed significantly were William Wychearly and William Congreve. Dryden also wrote play for the court but he failed to achieve the same reputation as other playwrights did. During the restoration period, the genre of drama headed towards the decadence and prose gradually gaining acceptance among the people with the emergence of pamphelts.

'Indian English Literature'

According a news published in Times of India on September 18, 2011, National-level English Poetry Festival, organized for the first time in Kerala. The festival emphasized on the need to promote Indian English Literature. Nearly 26 papers on Indian English poets and their writings were presented at the two-day festival held at St Theresa's College. The idea behind the encourgement of Indian English literature emphasized the fact the post colonial literature taking lead and catching the attention of people across the world. Writers writing in English have not only crafted a separate identity of themselves, but also gave a new direction to english with the inclusion of vermacular language and hydrization of orthodox language. The Common Wealth Literature with which most of literature of third world countries on which the britishers had ruled take forward the colonial past. This colonial past offshots in vernaculization of English that encapsulates words of regional language and adding of suffix in the form of "Hain Na" with the final point of each sentemce. People often make continous forms of words that do not hold such essence in original like My head is paining. However, this is not the distortion of the English but enrichment of it through cultural emboidment and regional language intrusion.