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UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY*

I libri parlano sempre di altri libri. [Books always speak of other books] (U. Eco, Postille a Il nome della rosa )

ROCCO CAPOZZI University of Toronto

riting on 's Il nome della rosa (1980), and Il pendolo di Foucault (1981)1, some thirty years after their first appearances has advantages and disadvantages. The bibliographies of articles, W 2 texts and monographic studies are becoming overwhelming for readers and researchers interested in Eco the intellectual, the medievalist, the semiotician,

*What follows is part of the first chapter of my work in progress "Eco the semiotician narrator"; 'vertigo of intertextuality' is a parodic allusion to Eco's Vertigine della lista (2009; The Infinity of Lists ) which sheds light on Eco's love for the "aesthetics of excess".

1 Il nome della rosa (Milano: Bompiani, 1980), Il pendolo di Foucault (Milano: Bompiani, 1988), Il cimitero di Praga (Milano: Bompiani, 2010). The English translations are from William Weaver's The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983; hereafter abbreviated The Rose ), Postscript to The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), Foucault's Pendulum (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989; abbreviated Pendulum ). The Prague Cemetery is translated by Richard Dixon (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) and hereafter is abbreviated as The Cemetery . For the Postille a Il nome della rosa I use the edition published as a booklet and distributed with the 1984 paperback edition of Il nome della rosa ; hereafter abbreviated as Postille . 2 Among the many monographic studies and collection of essays I should mention Teresa De Lauretis' Eco (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1981); Renato 438 ROCCO CAPOZZI the communication and media expert, the essayist and the narrator who, for over four decades, has been at the center of the international cultural scene. Understandably critics are now listing only selected works, as I shall also do here for practical reasons. By the same token on the Internet can be found extensive bibliographies that are updated regularly, as well as numerous YouTube 3 videos covering his interviews and lectures. And thus, what remains to be said about Eco's first two novels? Plenty, especially if we reread them in view of the author's remarkable coherence throughout his six novels and the so called "Effetto Eco" ‒ the spin-off and the influence of his texts and the reaction of readers around the world to the Italian intellectual guru of culture. Here I shall deal with some recurring elements in the two novels while focusing on the historical, cultural, literary and theoretical arena in which, and

Giovannoli, Saggi su Il nome della rosa (Milano: Bompiani, 1985); Manlio Talamo, I segreti del Pendolo: percorsi e gioco intorno al Pendolo di Foucault (Napoli: Simone, 1989); Jules Gritti's Umberto Eco (: Editions Universitaires, 1991); Roberto Cotroneo, La diffidenza come sistema (Milano: Anabasi, 1995); R. Capozzi (edited by), Reading Eco (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Norma Bouchard and V. Pravadelli(edited by), The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretations: Umberto Eco's Alternatives (New York: Peter Lang, 1988); Michael Caesar's U. Eco. Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); J. Petitot and P. Fabbri (edited by), Au nom du sens. Autour de l'oeuvre d'Umberto Eco. Colloque Cerisy (Paris: Grasset 2001; Italian translation, Nel nome del senso , Milano: Sansoni 2001); Roberto Cotroneo's Due o tre cose che so su di lui (Milano: Bompiani, 2001); Cristina Farronato's Eco's Chaosmos (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003); and Franco Forchetti, Il segno e la rosa. I segreti della narrativa di U. Eco (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2005); P. Bondanella (edited by), New Essays on U. Eco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Tra Eco e Calvino. Relazioni rizomatiche , edited by R. Capozzi (Milano: Encyclomedia, 2013). 3 See Porta Ludovica, www.themodernworld.com/eco , www.umbertoecoreaders.blogspot.com , and from the University of Bologna, www.umbertoeco.it . And thanks to video interviews on Youtube we get to enter Eco's home in Milan and see that indeed, it is not an exaggeration, his corridors and rooms are literally filled with books, nearly 30,000 of them. Another 20,000 books can be found in his summer home near Urbino, making Eco the owner of possibly the largest personal library in the world. 439 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY against which, Eco writes his first two possible worlds 4. The historic-cultural environment is an integral part of the encyclopedia of information that contributes to making a reading of Eco's novels an educating, challenging and entertaining experience. In referring to a cultural climate that sees fiction associated with metafiction, bricolage , montage, rhizomatic and decentered structures (fragments, chance, disorder, chaos), Gianni Vattimo's notions of pensiero debole [weak thought], crisis of reason, writing as re-writing, recycling, mass media (TV, comic books, cinema), encyclopedia, hybridity, literariness, conceptual art, Borgesian models as well as interests in esotericism, cabala and readers' role in postmodern hybrid novels such as Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979). Concerning Calvino, by the mid Sixties he had embraced Borgesian aesthetics, strategies of ars combinatoria and Parisian literary theories proposed by Barthes, Greimas and the Tel Quel and OULIPO groups. Also, his statements in "Cibernetica e fantasmi" (1967; Cybernetics and Ghosts), about the death of the author and literature as ars combinatoria , literariness, as well as about novels as machines and system of signs, unsettled both conservative and Marxist critics. A recent international conference on the rhyzomatic relationships between Calvino and Eco examined to what extent Eco may have been inspired by Italo Calvino 5 in many ways. First of all we would agree that they share the same views on the novel as: iper-romanzo6 [hyper-novel], a network of relationships, ars combinatoria , an open encyclopedia and a cognitive process. Indeed they both produce multivalent texts. Moreover as writers they share the qualities outlined by Calvino in the closing lines of "Moltiplicità" in

4 I am applying the term 'possible world' of fiction as discussed by Thomas Pavel in Fictional Wolds (1986) and Lubomir Doležel in Heterocosmica. Fictions as Possible Worlds (1988). 5 Tra Eco e Calvino. Relazioni rizomatiche (2013), op. cit . Eco knew Calvino since the late Fifties but it is mainly from their collaboration on Vittorini's journal Il Menabò , Vols. 4 and 5, that they became friends. Eco gives credit to Calvino for discussions on novels and tarot cards as well as for having suggested that he publish the essays of Opera aperta in 1962: "Calvino était le romancier que j'admirais le plus, un ami avec lequel j'avais discuté ces année-là, par exemple de problem de structure Romanesque, des problems de tarots. C'est Calvino aussi qui avait été le premier à me suggérer de réunir mes essays pour ce qui est devenu l'Oeuvre ouverte ", Le Magazine Littéraire (February 1989), p. 22. 6 Calvino used the term first in "Cibernetica e fantasmi" (1967); later elaborates on it in "Molteplicità" in Lezioni americane . 440 ROCCO CAPOZZI

Lezioni americane 7:

Chi siamo noi, chi è ciascuno di noi se non una combinatoria d'esperienze, d'informazioni, di letture, d'immaginazioni? Ogni vita è un'enciclopedia, una biblioteca, un inventario d'oggetti, un campionario di stili, dove tutto può essere continuamente rimescolato e riodinato in tutti i modi possibili (p.120). [Who are we […] if not a combinatorial of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable] (p. 124).

Calvino may have also set the stage in terms of revealing to readers his encyclopedic competence that lies at the foundation of his narratives. With the publication of his most important essays Una pietra sopra (1980; most of them translated in The Uses of Literature , 1986) and later with the posthumous publication of Six Memos for the Next Millennium Calvino discussed valuable material for the analyses of the relationships between literary theories and narrative practices in his own works. Eco begins his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994), praising Calvino who among many other things in the unfinished Norton lectures affirmed his faith in the future of literature. In the opening essay of On Literature , "On Some Functions of Literature", Eco outlines his own faith in literature as he speaks of the power of the network of texts which humanity has produced and still produces not for practical ends (p. 1). Moreover, it's worth recalling a statement by Calvino from "La letteratura come proiezione del desiderio" (1969) [Literature as Projection of Desire], a note-review of N. Frye's Anatomy of Criticism , where Calvino speaks of encyclopedic forms, Borges, libraries and apocryphal texts:

La biblioteca ideale a cui tendo è quella che gravita verso il fuori, verso i libri "apocrifi", nel senso etimologico della parola, cioè i libri "nascosti". La letteratura è ricerca del libro nascosto, lontano, che cambia il valore dei libri noti, è la tensione verso il nuovo testo

7 Lesson 5 "Multiplicity" in Calvino's undelivered Norton Lectures published posthumously: Lezioni americane (Milano: Garzanti, 1988); Six Lessons for the Next Millenium , Translated by Patrick Creagh (New York: Random House, 1993). 441 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY

apocrifo da ritrovare o da inventare 8. [The ideal library that I would like to see is one that gravitates toward the outside, toward the "apocryphal" books, in the etymological sense of the word: that is, "hidden" books. Literature is a search for the book hidden in the distance that alters the value and meaning of the known books (p. 61)].

Eco may have had these notions in mind when writing The Rose . In addition to the fact that Borges has played a major role in both writers, it's easy to think of several similarities between Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore and Eco's Il pendolo di Foucault. Both novels are self-reflexive, metafictional, rhizomatic interrelationships of texts, Bakhtinian mosaics of texts, machines for generating interpretation, Borgesian libraries, and brilliant illustrations of authors, in the tradition of L. Sterne's Tristram Shanty , playing cat and mouse with their readers. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is also a wonderful parody of reader reception theories popularized mainly by Wolfgang Iser ( The Implied Reader , 1974; The Act of Reading , 1978) and Eco (The Role of the Reader , 1979) . Furthermore, in addition to Marco Polo's Il milione and John Mandeville's The Travels , I believe that Calvino's Le città invisibili (1972) plays a key role in Eco's (2000). Post neo-avanguadia and Gruppo 63 polemics surrounding socio-political awareness of writers continued throughout the Seventies in Italy. Experimental narrators such as Calvino, E. Sanguineti, G. Celati, G. Manganelli, and L. Malerba, each in his own fashion, were illustrating different ways of renewing the Italian novel. Part of the experimentalism was inspired by the French nouveau roman popularized by writers such as A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarraute, P. Sollers, and M. Butor. French cultural gurus like the semiotician R. Barthes, the philosopher M. Foucault, the anthropologist C. Levi-Strauss, as well as critics such as M. Blanchot, J. Derrida, J. Kristeva and G. Deleuze, and R. Queneau, G. Perec and the OULIPO remained influential in the Italian literary scene well into the Eighties. By the same token, the leftist ideological dimension of the new fiction was in part the result of switching from Lukacsian and Gramscian marxist theories, to the writings of T.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin, H. Marcuse, Guy Debord and J. Baudrillard. Postmodernism arrived somewhat late in Italy 9 and in general follows the debates on postmodernism and political discourse between J. Habermas and

8 Una pietra sopra (Torino: Einaudi, 1980), p. 203. English translation by Patrick Creagh, The Uses of Literature (San Diego-New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). 9 See my "Il romanzo postmoderno né nostalgico né meccanico", in Teoria e critica letteraria oggi , edited by Romano Luperini (Milano: Franco Angeli, 442 ROCCO CAPOZZI

J.F. Lyotard at the end of the Seventies (see Lyotard's Introduction in The Postmodern Condition , 1984). However, as we can see from the works of Calvino and Eco American postmodern novelists such as J. Barth and T. Pynchon 10 were already popular as were Leslie Fiedler's writings and Barth's canonical essays on "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) and "The Literature of Replenishment" (1980). Moreover, from the late Sixties we see the growing interests in M. Bakhtin 11 among critics, semioticians and narratologists as terms like dialogism, heteroglossia, polyphony, carnivalization and chronotope are commonly used by writers, teachers and students of literature. From French and Italian translations Eco was acquainted with Bakhtin's works on Dostojevskj, Rabelais and on the aesthetics of the novel before the late Seventies. And so, it is no accident that The Rose is among many other things an example of a mosaic of quotations containing intertextual echoes of Bakhtin on parody, fusion of styles, Coena cipriani and the carnevalesque. Bakhtin, just as Conan Doyle, R. Barthes, J.L. Borges, C. S. Peirce and L. Wittegenstein is part of Eco's witty anachronisms planted in the novel 12 . But, just as important, the allusions to Bakhtin also remind us of discussions on how a text is not an isolated object, and that instead it should

1991), pp. 87-110; also, Monica Jansen, Il dibattito sul postmoderno in Italia. In bilico tra dialettica e ambiguità (Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore, 2002). 10 In particular Pynchon's: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), three novels that take the topic of paranoia to new heights. 11 Augusto Ponzio was among the first critics in Italy to examine the writings of Bakhtin: Michail Bachtin. Semiotica, teoria della letteratura, e marxismo (Bari: Dedalo Libri, 1977). In 1979 a fundamental volume of Bakhtin's essays appears: Estetica e romanzo (edited and translated by Clara Strands Janovic (Torino: Einaudi, 1979). 12 Burkhart Kroeber and Ursula Schick are some of the first critics to mention the presence of Bakhtin in The Rose . Their articles are reprinted in Saggi su Il nome della rosa , where also appears my first article on The Rose written in 1981, which focuses on semiotics, intertextuality and Eco's The Role of the Reader , and Walter Stephens' 'Ec(h)o in fabula'. Stephens gives full details in English of the paratextual elements on the book cover of the first Italian edition and speaks about intertextual references to Borges, Rabelais, the Coena Cipriani and Lector in fabula . Concerning anachronism Eco has explained in Postscript : "I knew very well that it was not my medieval men who were being modern; if anything, it was the moderns who were thinking medievally" (p. 76). 443 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY be viewed as an ensemble of linguistic and cultural signs in the multiplicity of texts and polyphony 13 of voices of our cultural history. Lisola del giorno prima (1994), La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (2004), and Il Cimitero di Praga (2010) confirm that beginning with The Rose and Pendulum , Eco loves to narrate primarily ideas, images, texts and cultural and historical events suggested by the present socio-political and cultural reality 14 , and that he chooses to go back in history in order to set his hybrid possible worlds of fiction rich with details and spatial-temporal descriptions. With coherence and continuity, and driven by the principle of docere et delectare , his cognitive and epistemological hybrid novels are intended to map ideas, history, knowledge, myths, mistakes, conspiracies, forgeries, truths and falsehoods. Eco illustrates how there is nothing new under the sun and that often we merely repeat history, or that at times we have actually gone backwards (see the essays in A passo di gambero , 2006; Turning back the clock , 2007 ‒ on the importance of memory and history). The famous conclusion of The Rose stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus 15 , is also meant to echo the major division between realists and nominalists in the Middle Ages ‒ and there are plenty of discussions about this issue throughout the novel. Indeed it is a division that continues throughout the centuries and up to the present among so called postmodernists and realists 16 . By the end of

13 The term appears in The Rose : "And as I withdrew my fascinated eye from the enigmatic polyphony of sainted limbs and infernal sinews …." (p. 43); and in Pendulum : "Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas" (p. 50). 14 Queen Loana , a novel concerned primarily with the topic of memory also deals with the Fascist era from 1920-1944; it came out in time to commemorate the 60 th anniversary of the Italian Liberation. Il cimitero di Praga written to unveil myths and falsehoods that continue to surround the forged document The Protocols of Sion , deals in part with the and it came out in time to celebrate the 150 th anniversary of the Italian Unification. Among the many conspiracies narrated in the novel, three chapters deal with 'plots' related to Garibaldi's expedition and the mysterious death of . 15 The last words of the novel speak about nominalism but they also take us full circle back to the beginning of the novel, to the preface about the found manuscript and to the Prologue which quotes Genesis 1:1: "In principio era il Verbo e il Verbo era presso Dio" (p. 19) [In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God]. 16 See for example the various debates surrounding Roberto Saviano's Gomorra (2006) and Maurizio Ferraris' study Manifesto del nuovo realismo (2012); philosophers such as Eco and Vattimo and numerous academics and 444 ROCCO CAPOZZI

Day Four the novice Adso understands the relationships between words, ideas and referential reality as he comprehends the connection between the verbal sign unicorn as it exists in texts but not in reality. But these discussions also allude to the polemics that post-structuralists were inciting among academics in the late Seventies and Eighties. History ‒ the links and continuity between past and present as well as Cicero's belief that historia magistra vitae ‒ is a crucial element in all of Eco's novels. For example, in The Rose within the topics of intolerance and the revolution of heretics (Dolcinean, Catharists, Patarines, Bogomils and Spiritualists) in the Middle Ages we recognize allusions to the decade of terrorism in the Seventies in Italy by black and red brigades. In Foucault's Pendulum many discussions are directly related to Italian politics and to literary theories from the 70's and 80's. I am speaking of the students' and workers' revolution of 1968-69, of a decade of kidnappings and bombings and of the increasing popularity of esoteric literature associated with Rosecrucians, Templars, Masons, Opus Dei, and the alleged Jewish conspiracy perpetuated by the fake document "The Protocols of Sion". Throughout the novel we also find allusions to the radical applications of unlimited semiosis encouraged by post-structuralist and deconstructionist misreadings of C.S. Peirce's notion of infinite semiosis that extends between dynamic object, signs and interpretants. Overall, a key message in Eco's novels is that if we wish to have a better understanding of our present we should know our past. Historical contextualization of culture, events, ideas and texts is at the foundation of Eco's novels because the author firmly believes that our past both conditions and explains our present. Casaubon reminds us in Pendulum : "Credo che si diventi quel che nostro padre ci ha insegnato nei tempi morti" (p. 47) [I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments (p. 49)]. Perhaps not enough has been said about Eco's postmodern historical realism within the context of Hayden White's notions of historiography (see Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe , 1973) and of later theories on postmodern New-Historicism (see Stephen Greenblatt and H. Aran Veeser). The same can be said for the connections between Eco and Guy Debord on how knowledge of History (especially objective historical knowledge) seems to disappear in our society of

narrators such as Luperini, Ferroni, the Wu Ming and Donnarumma have been arguing for or against a need to return to realism after three decades of postmodernism in literature and the arts. See also the essays in the 2010 volume of Tirature , edited by Vittorio Spinazzola with a special section on Il new italian realism (pp. 10-69). 445 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY spectacle 17 . From The Rose to The Prague Cemetery , always respecting spatial, temporal and cultural restraints, Eco grounds his fiction in specific moments of our history and shows how history may be made/re-constructed by forged documents starting with the Donation of Constantine, on to the letter of the legendary Prester John (see Baudolino ), "The Protocols of Sion", weapons of mass destruction, and so on. Eco's novels are about erudition, epistemology, cognitive journeys 18 , quests for a grail, secrets, conspiracies, fakes, forgery, golem, revisiting history, knowledge as power 19 , auctoritas , reading natural and verbal signs, memory, books, lists, palimpsests, rediscovered manuscripts, parodies, language, Bildungsroman , and the media. And so it is understandable that his first novel takes place in the Middle Ages, in a Benedictine abbey dominated by a library, that the library is like a labyrinth and at its center there is a forbidden text protected by a dogmatic, blind authoritative monk who believes in censoring texts that may undermine authority, and that the blind monk should be called Jorge of Burgos to recall ‒ with both irony and parody ‒ the famous and great writer Borges, the icon of metaphysical stories about encyclopedias, mirrors, apocryphal texts, libraries and labyrinths. Eco has little tolerance for dogmatic unilateral interpretations of truths and texts, as well as for those who choose to ignore facts, are misinformed and embrace falsehoods mainly because of stupidity or because they lack awareness or memory of History. What comes immediately to mind are William's words to Adso as he paraphrases Bernard of Chartres' aphorism: 'dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they do' (p.86) and, shortly after, with irony, speaks of learned men of our time as dwarfs on the shoulders of dwarfs (p. 89). Eco knows that the querelle des anciens et des modernes 20 is an old polemic already a reality in the Middle Ages with

17 The Society of Spectacle (1967); see also Commentaires sur la societè du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1996; trans. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle , available online). The central role of History in Eco's novel is the topic of Chapter 2 of my work in progress on Eco. History is also used to set constraints to his possible worlds. 18 Brian McHale's expression "epistemological quest" is fitting, see Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 148. 19 Perhaps more than an allusion to M. Foucault the notion of 'knowledge is power' refers to Francis Bacon's aphorism from Meditations , 1597. In Foucault's Pendulum the English empiricist is quoted several times, see below note 42. 20 Eco has spoken on the querelle in "La querelle degli antichi e dei moderni. The day after", in I vecchi e i giovani . Proceedings , edited by Marina 446 ROCCO CAPOZZI classical, Latin and religious authors either being cited as auctoritates or being challenged as reliable sources. And so Eco forces the question on his readers: today are we standing on the shoulders of giants or on those of dwarfs? Are we ignoring our past? Postscript to the Name of the Rose (1983), Six Walks in the Fictional Wood (1994), On Literature ,(2004, a translation of Sulla letteratura , 2002), and most recently the essays in Confessions of a Young Novelist (Harvard UP, 2011; his Richard Ellmann lectures delivered in 2008 at Emory University) and Costruire il nemico (2012), have shed light on Eco the narrator as well as on his views on literature, anxiety of influence, feuilletons , popular and historical novels of the 19th century, Nerval, detective fiction, intertextual irony, fictional characters, relationships between authors, texts, interpreters, translators and readers, uses of list and strategies of "double coding"21 . In Lector in Fabula (1979; The Role of the Reader Eco treated narratological strategies that he had begun to examine in the Sixties, possibly after reading Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) and most certainly when he was working on Le poetiche di Joyce (1966) 22 . Concerning his role in reader reception theories that he had first proposed in the seminal essays of Opera aperta (1962; The Open work , 1989) and later developed in The Role of the Reader , it should be noted that by switching the focus from the author to the text and to the reader's cooperation in giving meaning(s) to an open text, Eco

Polacco (Torino: Le Monnier, 2002), pp. 9-23. The paper contains many topics pertinent to our discussion and includes references to Virgil the grammarian, The Book of Kells , J. Joyce's, Finnigans Wake , and anxiety of influence. Part of the paper appears in On Literature in the essay "A Portrait of the artist as Bachelor", pp. 84-103. 21 In On Literature Eco links double coding and postmodernism as he quotes Charles Jencks who applied the term to postmodern architecture and its fusion of form and function in The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977). 22 The Aesthetics of Chaosmos. The Middle Ages of James Joyce (translated by Ellen Esrock Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). The importance of Joyce in Eco's narratives cannot be overlooked. We need only to read a few statements from his studies on Ulysses and Finnigans Wake to see obvious analogies with Eco's hybrid encyclopedic novels: "To me, Joyce was the node where the Middle Ages and the avant-garde meet"( p. xi); Joyce thus conceived of a total work, a Work-as-Cosmos. The reference point is not the poet in his ivory tower but the human community and, ultimately, "all history and culture" (p. 33); "Joyce creates a story interwoven with symbols and ciphered allusions, with 'winks' from one scholarly intelligence to another, for under the 'Velame delli versi strani' lies an ulterior reality, and each word, each image, not only points to one thing, but at the same time indicates another" (p. 48). 447 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY did not suggest the total elimination (the death) of the author, nor hermetic semiosis 23 and infinite interpretations of texts. Eco addresses these issues in I limiti dell'interpretazione (1990) and Interpretation and Overinterpreation (1992) as he felt partly responsible for what had happened to his original theory of the open text and thus felt compelled to explain that one cannot make a text say what it does not want to say.

Eco the semiotician narrator

An established scholar and famous semiotician, Eco started to write his first novel in 1978, at the age of 46, when Italy was under siege as black and red brigade terrorists unsettled and ripped apart the socio-economic and political structures of a society that had enjoyed an economic and industrial boom since the early Sixties. Italians were living with fears and paranoia of conspiracies that culminated in the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in March of 1978. Eco had become disillusioned with ontological structuralism ‒ mainly Levi-Strauss' dogmatic conception of structure (see pp. 350-356 in La Struttura assente , 1968) ‒ and had established himself as the main exponent of Peircean semiotics with the publication of the first manual of semiotics: Trattato di semiotica generale , 1974 (1975; A Treatise of Semiotics ). From the days of La struttura assente he had switched the focus from Saussurean binary relationships between signifié and signifiants , to the triadic relations between objects, signs and interpretant, as proposed by C. S. Peirce in the Collected Papers . As he begins to abandon his interests in codes, dictionaries, binary systems, and Chomsky's models of syntagmatic chains, he focuses more on encyclopedias, rhizomatic systems, metaphors, and paradygmatic structures. In the late Sixties Julia Kristeva, active with Todorov within the Tel Quel group, had been popularizing Bakhtinian theories and in particular the concepts of intertextuality while Eco was concerned with the radical interpretations of unlimited semiosis and hermetic drift of meaning. A concern illustrated throughout Pendulum but already present in his first novel. In The Rose hermetic drift and issues related to the extreme interpretations of Derrida's aphorism "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" (see Of Grammatology , 1976) are alluded to, for example, in Adso's question: Ma allora posso sempre e solo parlare di qualcosa che mi parla di qualcosa d'altro e via di seguito, ma il

23 Following Interpretation and Overinterpreation (1992) Eco revisited the discussion on hermetic drift and hermetic semiosis in a clear and succinct article: "Unlimited Semiosis and Drift: Pragmaticism vs. Pragmatism", in Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries , edited by K.L. Ketner (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995). 448 ROCCO CAPOZZI qualcosa finale, quello vero, non c'è mai? (p. 320) [Then I can always and only speak of something that speaks to me of something else, and so on. But the final something, the true one, does that ever exist? (p. 317)]. On the back cover of the paper jacket of the first edition of The Rose Eco explains that at a mature age he has decided to write a novel because "di ciò di cui non si può teorizzare, si deve narrare" [what cannot be theorized must be narrated] 24 . Beginning with my first article on The Rose I have maintained that Eco's own texts are present in his novels and that it is not hard to construct the author's intellectual biography from his narrative. I also believe that by writing novels Eco puts his theories into practice and that his narratives are mainly the result of his teaching and research 25 as well as of narrative skills

24 The intertextual echo is to Wittgenstein's proposition: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence". Another of Wittgenstein's propositions is paraphrased at the end of the novel: "The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away" (p. 599). The red paper jacket of the first Italian edition is loaded with paratextual elements. For example: on the cover is reproduced an image of a labyrinth from the floor of the Reims Cathedral; on the inside of the paper jacket we find a revealing blurb about the historical frame of the novel, about different levels of readers, about the difficulty of defining this novel, the novel being made of other texts and a detective/mystery text of citations. This reminds us of G. Genette who maintains that before we enter a text the paratext gives us several clues about what we are about to read. For example: the octagonal labyrinth, the importance of architecture, a fusion of elements: gothic, historical, ideological, allegorical, and of different levels of readings; as well as warning us that in addition to a the mystery story there is also the mystery of the innumerable intertextual references, some explicit, others clear only to experts (medievalists, semioticians and academics). 25 In addition to personal anecdotes from his personal biography, such as growing up in Piedmont, his teen years under Fascism, his travels and his work that are recognizable in his main protagonists such Casaubon, Belbo, Roberto and Yambo we recognize his teaching and his research. Teresa De Lauretis in her brilliant article "Gaudy Rose. Eco and Narcissism" states that The Rose is "a novel built in the vast laboratory of his critical studies and politico-cultural activities of over two decades, and properly a 'summation' of the particular vision of history and culture, cognition and creativity, the world and the text, that emerges with consistency from his entire work" (Reading Eco , p. 241). In addition to his knowledge of the Middle Ages which he has used extensively in The Rose and Baudolino , Eco's teaching at the University of Bologna on fakes and hermetic criticism (see L'idea deforme. Interpretatzioni esoteriche di Dante , Milano: Bompiani, 1989) is present in 449 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY learned from novelists that have made a strong impression on him. I am thinking especially of E.A. Poe, A. Dumas, V. Hugo, E. Sue, L. Stevenson, A. Manzoni, E. Salgari, G. de Nerval, T. Mann, J. Joyce, Borges, Perec, and Calvino. The list of Latin and patristic authors from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas is in itself another topic for discussion. Medievalists like Theresa Coletti (see Naming the Rose. Medieval Signs and Modern Theory , 1988) have examined Eco's medieval erudition. Furthermore his novels reveal his love for the 19th century feuilleton 26 , for the linguistic and structural experimentalism of Joyce, for the detective fiction genre, for the metaphysical narratives of Borges and for popular culture. The Name of the Rose became an instant international best seller to the surprise of the author and the publisher. Eco has admitted in interviews that he went on to write his second novel almost as a challenge, not so much to see if he could duplicate the success of The Rose , as to see if he could indeed write novels. Eight years later, with Foucault's Pendulum ‒ the most engaging of his novels to date ‒ Eco joined the company of illustrious academic narrators

Pendulum ; his research on the apocalypse of Beato di Liébana (1973) is present in The Rose ; his research on Templars and 'Protocols of Sion' are used in Pendulum and The Cemetery of Prague ; his studies on metaphor have been exploited in The Island of the Day Before ; his studies on memory and in particular his appreciation of Frances Yates' The Theatre of Memory and his work on Nerval's Sylvie are clearly present in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana . Furthermore, if one reads not just Eco's essays but also his journalistic writings in l'Espresso and la Republica , immediately before or after the appearance of his novels, one recognizes that quite often he is discussing material narrated in his novels. I would also like to add that as ironic as it may sound there is some truth in Eco's affirmation in The Cemetery of Prague that makes us think of his main characters: "Mi è sempre stato detto che i grandi narratori si descrivono sempre nei loro personaggi" (p. 325) [I have always been told that great narrators describe themselves in their characters]. I am thinking specifically of William, Casaubon, Baudolino and Yambo. 26 Feuilletton in the English translation of Pendulum has become 'dime novel' and 'cheap fiction' (see Chapter 97). Belbo tells Casaubon: "Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the true measure of reality. […] I played with the dime novel, in order to take a stroll outside of life" (p. 495). The Italian original reads: "Io col feuilletton giocavo, per passeggiare un poco fuori della vita". The reference to feuilletton is important not only because the topic is at the center of Il Cimitero di Praga but because it is a direct reference to Eco's passion for 19th century feuilletton and popular novels of writers like A. Dumas, Eugene Sue and Edmondo De Amicis. 450 ROCCO CAPOZZI like David Lodge and John Barth. In Italy and around the world he opened the gate for academics and journalists who tried to duplicate Eco's success story with a variety of historical detective fiction. However, the unprecedented international success of The Rose also saw in Italy divisions among conservative critics debating the merits of the novel. In 1988 some critics were even more cynical about Foucault's Pendulum , partly because the polemics had started several weeks before the publication of the novel, and once again Eco fell under accusations of having orchestrated and collaborating in editorial marketing and a media ploy 27 .

The Name of the Rose . Signs of Culture, labyrinth and truths

Scrivere un romanzo è una faccenda cosmologica, come quella raccontata dal Genesi (bisogna pur scegliersi dei modelli, diceva Woody Allen). […] Intendo che per raccontare bisogna innanzitutto costruirsi un mondo, il più possibile ammobiliato sino agli ultimi particolari ( Postille, p.16). [Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it) […] What I mean is that to tell a story you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the last details; Postscript , pp. 20, 23].

The Name of the Rose is extremely well constructed with detailed historical and cultural accounts that makes the Middle Ages come to life with its philosophical and theological debates. The many voices and digressions in the novel focus on the confrontations between Church (Pope John XXII) and State (Emperor Ludovic of Bavaria), as well as on the inner divisions among religious orders (Benedictines, Domenican, Franciscan, and minor orders), on the gap that separates rich and poor, educated few and ignorant masses, strong believers (authoritarians and religious fanatics) and those who question authorities and are considered heretics. William, a mixture of Doyle's William of Baskerville, Elliss Brother Caedfel, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown, A. Christie's Poirot, and William of Occam, employs logic, conjectures,

27 While the 'Ecomania' took over some critics undermined the success of Foucault's Pendulum claiming that it was a novel that everybody bought but no one read. The weekly magazine L'Europeo published a series of brief negative statements from several critics that included narrators such as Del Giudice, Pazzi, Elkam, Sanguineti, and Montefoschi. See "Francoforte, la syndrome Foucault. Eco e Narciso" (October 21), pp. 142-145. During the Summer of 1988 I followed the polemics which I documented in "Troppi movimenti intorno al Pendolo di Eco", op. cit.; see also F. Pansa and A. Vinci's Effetto Eco (Roma: Nuova edizione del Gallo, 1990). 451 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY psychology of human nature, science and reason in his argumentations and must struggle in order not to appear as a heretic in the eyes of closed minded authoritarians like Bernardo Guy and Jorge of Burgos. Within the walls of the monastery the sequence of events follows closely the canonical hours dictated by monastic life. Instead of chapters, the novel is divided into seven days and each day is divided according to liturgical hours. Beginning with the paratextual references on the cover, as we proceed to the parodic preface cleverly labeled "Naturally a manuscript" (which sets the stage for ironic references to found manuscripts, historical novels and metafiction ‒ from Cervantes to Borges), to the author's note on liturgical hours, to the prologue and its biblical opening line "In principio era il verbo" [In the beginning there was the Word], and up to the concluding chapter (another clever wink at the reader with the title Last Folio) 28 we notice a narrative structure and a possible world in which metafiction, semiotics, intertextuality, digressions and chains of analogies are all in harmony. Moreover, the map/plan of the abbey, a paratextual image that appears before the title page of the text, is an indication that Eco wants readers to picture and follow very carefully all the moves of his protagonists. Throughout the novel we learn the importance of contextualizing numbers, words, signs, citations, texts, characters and events in order to arrive at their proper meaning. This is clearly the case for the number seven which is loaded with allusions to the days of creation, capital sins, virtues, trumpets of the apocalypse, and so on including the division of the novel into 7 days 29 . Even the password to be deciphered is related to the word quatuor which contains seven letters. We also learn that signs like the lion and the serpent can be read pro bono or pro malo 30 , that some words like blitiri or bu-ba-baff (p.107) have

28 The title is an intertextual allusion to Nerval's Dernier Feuillet at the conclusion of Sylvie (1854). 29 Ironically on the seventh day comes the apocalypse and so biblically speaking we go from Genesis to Revelation. The abbey burns to ashes as we witness a possible world constructed with words destroyed by words leaving us with Adso's final words: "I no longer know what is about: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus " (p. 502). 30 A most fascinating example in The Rose is Adso's difficulty in describing his sexual experience realizing that the same words can be used for pain and pleasure, sin and salvation: "Ma se l'amore della fiamma e dell'abisso sono figura dell'amore di dio, possono essere figura della morte e dell'amore del peccato? Sì, così come il leone e il serpente sono a un tempo figura e del Cristo e del demonio" (pp. 251-252) [But, if love of the flame and of the abyss are the metaphor for love of God, can they be metaphor for love of death and love of sin? Yes, as the lion and the serpent stand both for Christ and the 452 ROCCO CAPOZZI no meaning, that some are sign of signs (p. 19), while others have "more than one meaning" (p. 114). This is all part of the semiotic and philosophical education that Adso gains from William during the seven days in the abbey, which in turn is what William has learned from his teachers like Aristotle, Augustine, Roger Bacon and William of Occam. And naturally this all points to the rich knowledge that Eco has accumulated from his extensive readings from Aristotle to Aquinas, Kant, Peirce, Wittgenstein and innumerable writers from Dante to Calvino. The Rose is an excellent testimonial of how Eco constructs and populates his possible worlds based on his gamut of readings. His rich knowledge of the Middle Ages, of scholarly studies by authors like E.R. Curtius ( European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages ,1948), J. Huizinga ( Autumn of the Middle Ages ,1919; and Homo ludens , 1938), J. Le Goff ( Les intellectuels au moyen age , 1957), and of a myriad of literary, religious and classical texts have all provided rich resources from which he can draw models for his characters, ambience, culture, language, architecture and dialogues. Eco's remarkable encyclopedic competence is evident throughout the story as we follow William and Adso ‒ the two detective semioticians who try to solve the mystery surrounding a series of murders while at the same time attempting to unveil the secret of a forbidden manuscript (allegedly, and most fittingly for the novel's plot, Aristotle's second book of Poetics , dedicated to comedy) hidden in the labyrinthine library 31 . Time is of the essence because they must solve both mysteries before the arrival of the Papal delegation headed by the nasty and unforgivable inquisitor Bernardo Guy, while also solving some issues of heresy.

Devil" (p. 248). In Pendulum the same images return: "al richiamo emblematico del leone e del serpente?" (p. 20) [stand besides the emblematic lion and the serpent? (p. 16)]. 31 In Postscript Eco speaks of the labyrinth as 'an abstract model of conjecturality' (Postscript , p. 57), reminding us that in detective novels, the act of reading is a sequence of conjectures ‒ with one story ramifying into so many other stories. It is easy to see how his notion of labyrinths recalls the labyrinth of intertextuality, and, by extension, the image of a labyrinthine library. I would add that just as the inhabitants of the monastery, the readers of The Rose are also dominated by the 'library/labyrinth'. Libraries and books, however, are supposed to be instruments of knowledge and not prison- labyrinths or impenetrable fortresses. Furthermore, speaking of books we remember that Adso comes to the realization that "I libri non sono fatti per crederci, ma per essere sottoposti a indagine" (p. 319) [Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry (p. 380)], and more importantly that to know what one book says you must read others. 453 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY

William and Adso talk, pray, discuss, observe and investigate while the seven mysterious deaths take place as if they were following the order of the seven trumpets of the apocalypse; or so it seems to people like brother Alinardo who are easily conditioned by a biblical prophecy ‒ a ready-made order/structure. And who better than a paragon of logic and conjectures (of Peircean abductions; educated guesses) like Sherlock Holmes could serve as a key model for Eco's investigating Franciscan friar William of Baskerville 32 ? William was a former inquisitor who knows very well his nemesis, the fierce inquisitor Bernardo Guy, the person he will have to face later on in the story. From inquisitor to investigator, William knows how to apply logic, science, psychology and semiotics in his search for the truth. On the relationships between semiotics and the art of investigating it is helpful to read The Sign of Three (1983) ‒ essays by Eco, Thomas Sebeok and Carlo Ginzburg on Peirce, Holmes, Morelli, and Freud. And it is logical that the international icon of semiotics would saturate his narrative with a myriad of visual and verbal signs, as well as with ciphered messages and a plethora of symbols and allegorical elements associated with the Middle Ages. Reminiscent of Voltaire's Zadig, William shows his exceptional talent in using conjectures and deductive reasoning before entering the abbey when he guesses the owner and the name of the runaway horse, Brunello. This is also the beginning of Adso's apprenticeship on the art of perceiving/reading and interpreting verbal and natural signs. Adso will graduate from observer to interpreter. On the first day we see him at work as William asks him to read the footprints in the snow while they investigate the death of Adelmo of Otranto, the illuminator ‒ the first of seven monks who will die in seven days. There exist numerous studies dealing with key topics, symbols, characters, textual references, as well as the literary, historical and cultural background of The Rose 33 . In general critics agree that after the various labels and

32 A pioneer of stories set in the Middle Ages with a monk detective as main protagonist is Ellis Peters. His novels see the erborist monk Cadfael investigate murders (see especially A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977) and One Corpse Too Many (1979) . Italian authors that may have influenced Eco in narrating the Middle Ages and found/lost manuscripts are Roberto Vacca Il medioevo prossimo venturo (1971), Mario Pomilio's Il quinto evangelio (1975), and Alighiero Chiusano's Ordalia (1979). 33 Among the many texts that provide in depth analyses of The Rose see: Klaus Ickert and Ursula Schick, Il segreto della rosa decifrato (Firenze: Salani, 1986); A.J. Haft, G.J. White and R.J. White, The Key to The Name of the Rose (Harrinton Park: Ampersand Associates, 1987); Naming The Rose. Essays on Eco's The Name of the Rose , edited by M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988); Sandra Shillemans, "Umberto Eco and 454 ROCCO CAPOZZI classifications such as metaphysical mystery, detective story, historical novel, gothic novel, essay novel, postmodern metafiction, intertextual pastiche, and Bildungsroman have been applied to The Rose , the novel is ultimately Eco's way of affirming that texts are made of texts and that a narrative is essentially a linguistic pastiche of signs and systems of signs from the universal encyclopedia of history, literature and culture in general. The conclusion of the preface Naturally a Manuscript gives clues to Eco's ironic and parodic ésprit with which he undertakes his first narrative of a story about books, while also giving a little jab at critics who belittled literariness and literary divertissement . And because The Rose is also a recollection of culture (Postscript , p. 11), it explains why it is crammed with intertextual echoes ("inferential walks") that sends the reader back and forth through the centuries into the labyrinth of the encyclopedia of culture. Eco's art of exploiting intertextuality is about mapping culture and history mostly with what has already been written. Using texts Eco loves to reconstruct, revisit, rediscover and reinterpret our past in relation to the present. The Rose remains the model for his future novels in which we find a mixture of History, philosophy, scholarship, semiotics, socio-political allusions to the present and a detective story. The Rose is an ambiguous, polyvalent and polyphonic novel intended to generate multiple levels of reading and meanings. Soon after its appearance some critics began to analyze it as an application of Eco's semiotic theories presented in A Theory of Semiotics and The Role of the Reader while others pursued intertextual echoes and especially Borgesian allusions mainly to the short stories "Death and the Compass", "The Garden of the Forking Paths", "Tlön Uqbar", "Orbis Tertius" and "The Library of Babel". And as we learn in "Borges e la mia angoscia dell'influenza" in Sulla letteratura [Borges and my Anxiety of Influence; On Literature ] Eco likes to add "Pierre Menard author of the Quixote" as one of the stories that inspired him. Pierre Menard is in fact also an excellent example of the postmodern concept of writing as a process of rewriting. But I would add Borges' essay "A Defense of the Kabbala" (about Genesis, écriture and cabala) applicable to both The Rose and Pendulum and certainly the list could be much longer. With the publication of new articles as more intertextual echoes continued to be examined it became evident that Eco's Rose was a labyrinthine library that

William of Baskerville: Partners in Abductions", Semiotica (1992), pp. 259- 285; Ruggero Puletti, Il nome della rosa . Strutture forme e temi (Manduria: Piero Lacaita Editore, 1995); Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa . Introduzione e note , edited by Costantino Marmo (Milano: Bompiani, 1990); Bruno Pischedda, Come leggere Il nome della rosa (Milano, Mursia, 1994); R. Capozzi, Lettura, interpretazione e intetestualità: esercizi di commento a Il nome della rosa (Perugia: Guerra, 2001). 455 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY stimulates more readings and research as it invites readers to enrich their own encyclopedic competence. Perhaps with C.S. Peirce's definition of sign in mind, "a sign is something by knowing which we know something more (CP 8:332) and by means of intertexuality Eco has constructed his novels like mosaics of signs, through which by knowing his texts we get to know many other texts, and thus also about History and the encyclopedia of culture. Eco is a master of wit, his quick and witty remarks were already evident in Diario minimo (1963) and thus it is not a surprise that his possible worlds of fiction are also clever divertissements full of puns, word play, parody, irony, satire, and winking at the reader. In all of his novels readers will find witty aphorism spoken just at the right moment (reminiscent of James Bond) 34 . Laughter is in fact a key topic in The Rose. At times it does provide comic relief but in general is used as a cognitive instrument with intertextual motivations linking it to the topics of irony, parody and Bakhtinian concepts of laughter. In Postscript Eco states that he wanted the reader to have fun at least as much as he had fun writing the novel. However, it is important to note that he also adds Divertire non significa di-vertere , distogliere dai problemi (p. 33). [The reader was to be diverted, but not di-verted, distracted from problems (p. 59)]. Literary and linguistic pastiches (hybridizations) are assembled in a writer's laboratory/library. Eco thrives on taking his readers through libraries ‒ from his own 35 to the universal electronic one, the Internet. From The Rose to The Cemetery of Prague Eco has never abandoned his strategy of not inventing but instead he documents (quoting directly or indirectly, or alluding to) what has already been written, said, thought, illustrated, filmed and narrated. This strategy of bricolage and montage (with echoes of B. Pascal, Lévi-Strauss, J. Barth, H. Bloom, and J.L. Borges, of Kafka and his precursors) is explained in Postscript to the Name of the Rose where Eco mentions postmodernism 36 and

34 Eco is well familiar with Ian Fleming's Bond series. See his earliest essay on Bond "Le strutture narrative in Fleming", in Il superuomo di massa (Milano: Bompiani, 1976). The essays in this collection shed light on Eco's love affair with XIXth century popular novels and the works of V. Hugo and Eugene Sue. 35 Eco owns about 50,000 texts (see note 3). The best example of linking memory, libraries and museums can be found in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana where Eco narrates how Yambo recovers his memory by going through a great variety of memorabilia items in his grandfather's Summer house at Solara. 36 Eco's definition of postmodernism in Postscript to the Name of the Rose also explains his modus operandi in constructing possible worlds: "Unfortunately, 'postmodern' is a term bon à tout faire […]. I believe that 456 ROCCO CAPOZZI is underlined at the end of The Island of the Day Before : "non si può scrivere se non facendo palinsesto di un manoscritto ritrovato ‒ senza mai riuscire a sottrarsi all'Angoscia dell'Influenza" (p. 473) [it is impossible to write except by making a palimpsest of a rediscovered manuscript ‒ without ever succeeding in eluding the Anxiety of Influence (p. 512)]. Books, after all, as Eco has often recalled, speak of other books, are made of other books, and proliferate readings as well as the writing of other texts. The linguistic pastiche of The Rose ‒ and its hard to forget the comical grotesque character Salvatore who speaks all and no language ‒ is much too obvious as Latin, German, Italian, French, scientific, semiotic, literary, religious, philosophical, architectural, and other verbal signs come together in the novel. The linguistic pastiche complements, most appropriately, the intertextual literary pastiche of The Rose where, from the opening page to the last, from Genesis to the apocalyptic fire, many voices and many echoes of ideas and poetics come together in such a fashion that at times it is difficult to distinguish the author's own words from those of others. Undoubtedly Eco has great fun with pastiches and collages, it's an art form that the general public has become familiar with and sees it exploited by moviemakers such as Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg who excel in using citations, clichés, familiar frames and inter-filmic allusions to other films including their own. Palimpsest seems to have become a household term after The Rose . In Italy the term became popular before the movie director J.J. Annaud flashed it on the screen in 1986 in his palimpsest of Eco's novel, and G. Genette used it for a literature which, like parody, is once removed, or as the French narratologist calls it: to the second degree ( Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degrée , 1982). The Rose , as Eco explains in the Postille , is a textual journey on a fourth level of encasement 37 ‒ that is, at least four times removed from Adso's postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category ‒ or better still a Kunstwollen , a way of operating […]. The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past […]. The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited; but with irony, not innocently" (pp. 64-67). 37 "Così scrissi subito l'introduzione, ponendo la mia narrazione a un quarto livello di incassamento, dentro a altre tre narrazioni: io dico che Vallet diceva che Mabillon ha detto che Adso disse…" (p.15). [So I wrote the introduction immediately, setting my narrative on a fourth level of encasement, inside three other narratives. I'm saying that Vallet said that Mabillon said that Adso said..." ( Postscript , p. 20). As we recall the novel allegedly derives from a manuscript (received in 1968) is an Italian translation of a 1842 French trans- lation of an earlier French edition of an original [?] manuscript written in Latin by a German monk around the end of the 14th Century. I don't think that 457 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY experience. The term palimpsest appears in the Second Day, when William and Adso discover Venantius' body upside down in a barrel of blood. Looking at the footprints in the snow around the pool of blood William comments: "La neve, caro Adso, è una ammirevole pergamena sulla quale i corpi degli uomini lasciano scritture leggibilissime. Ma questo è un palinsesto mal raschiato e forse non ci leggeremo nulla di interessante (p. 113) [Snow, dear Adso, is an admirable parchment on which men's bodies leave very legible writing. But this palimpsest is badly scraped, and perhaps we will read nothing interesting on it (p. 105)]. As we can surmise from the choice of words, William/Eco extends to the reading of nature (to non verbal signs) the type of reading associated with the act of writing and rewriting over traces of previous writings. The Name of the Rose , far from being badly scraped, is a collage of palimpsests that allows readers to recognize a myriad of intertextual traces, including echoes of François Villon, Dante, Conan Doyle, Wittgenstein and Snoopy. In the collage we also notice witty manipulations of clichés which, as Eco has argued in his well known analysis of Casablanca 38 : "two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion" (p. 11). This is precisely what the hundreds of books do in The Rose, Pendulum and The Cemetery , they talk among themselves and celebrate a reunion. In the same article we find a statement that sheds light on The Rose and on the aesthetics of excess: Casablanca is a cult movie precisely because all the archetypes are there [...]. Casablanca has succeeded in becoming a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is the movie (p. 10). Eco, an expert on popular culture and on what makes a movie, a book, or a comic strip like Peanuts a cult, had no difficulty in writing his first novel combining popular frames and ingredients such as mystery, investigation, suspense, art of deciphering coded messages, logic, secrets, conspiracies, historical characters, puns, popular culture, and winking at the reader. The Name of the Rose became a cult novel around the world long before Dan Brown, who, after Foucault's Pendulum , follows Eco's footsteps with Angels and Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003).

Eco could have made his parody of the "found manuscript" any more obvious. It is worth noting that Eco's explanation of his fourth level of encasement is very much like Italo Calvino's explanation in "I livelli della realtà in letteratura" (1978), "Io scrivo che Omero racconta che Ulisse dice: io ho ascoltato il canto delle Sirene", in Una pietra sopra , p. 315. 38 "Casablanca a cult movie", in Sub-Stance 47 (1985), pp. 1-13. Also "Casablanca, or, The Clichés are Having a Ball", in Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers , Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, eds. (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994), pp. 260-264. 458 ROCCO CAPOZZI

The Rose , just as the library in the monastery, is structured like a labyrinthine relationship of books which challenges those who enter it. The library, we are told by Alinardo, is: "un gran labirinto, segno del labirinto del mondo. Entri e non sai se uscirai" (p. 163) [a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world. You enter and you do not know whether you will come out (p.158)]. Alinardo's words mirror our reading of The Rose ‒ sign of a labyrinth of intertextuality, where we enter and come out, depending on our curiosity and encyclopedic competence of literature, semiotics, architecture, philosophy, history, fine arts, etc. 39 The library is a metaphor of knowledge, and it is not a surprise that the labyrinthine library is the most overcoded symbol in the novel. It may very well be a disturbing space/place that M. Foucault calls a "Heterotopias" in the preface of The order of Things 40 . Indeed, the octagonal geometric plan of the library with the various inscriptions over the doors to the rooms is also a imago mundi , a reflection of mapping the known world and the terra incognita , using images of apocalypse (recalling those of Beatus of Liébana), bestiaries and imaginary maps based on mappe mundi and encyclopedic texts of the time (like those of Isidore of Seville, Honorius of Autun, Virgil the mad grammarian, or the Book of Kells )41 . The topic of real and imaginary maps

39 On a humorous side, in addition to the various allusions to "The Library of Babel", readers can appreciate Eco's wit in placing at the center of the labyrinthine library Jorge da Burgos, a hybrid composition of a fearful Minotaur and his beloved author and librarian J.L. Borges. 40 Foucault discusses at greater length heterotopias in the lecture: "Des espaces autres. Hétérotopies" (Conférence au Cercle d'études architecturales, 14 mars 1967), in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité , n. 5 (octobre 1984), pp. 46-49. See also H. Lefebvre, La production de l'espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974; English trans. by N. Donaldson-Smith, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 41 Probably few readers may have noticed that the collection of essays Dalla periferia dell'impero (1977) carry Eco's dedication to: 'Beato di Libana, Virgilio di Bigorre, e Onorio di Autun'. After The Rose it becomes clear that Eco was recalling the amazing illustrations of the apocalypse found in the work of Beato di Liébana. Moreover, Onorio di Autun, also known as Honorius Augustunensis, had written Imago mundi and is one of the authors cited by Eco in the scene where Adso makes love to the peasant girl in the kitchen. Onorio had written a commentary on the "Song of Songs" which Eco cites. Moreover Virgil, the so called "mad grammarian", present in The Rose , on Day IV (p.311), is also quoted in On Literature where Eco recalls the Book of Kells and the images of bestiaries, as well as the amazing experimental language in Epitomae and Epistulae . It is also worth noting Eco's article, full of Borgesian tones, "Dell'impossibilità di costruire la carta 459 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY returns in Pendulum 42 and is fully exploited in Baudolino . Maps and books are linked in a chain of allusions to the medieval concept of the book of nature and of the world being read like a book and viceversa. This is underlined as William explains to Adso how the plan of the library reproduces the map of the world. For Eco a library is much more than a place full of books; it is a personification of and metaphor for memory and knowledge, and perhaps even a substitute for God, an Ersatz 43 . This is also true for a museum like the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers , or personal libraries like the one Yambo discovers at Solara in Queen Loana , which given the topic of memory also brings to mind Aglié's studio in Pendulum : "Il mio piccolo teatro…alla maniera di quelle fantasie rinascimentali dove si disponevano delle enciclopedie visive…più che un'abitazione, una macchina per ricordare […]. Così io volgo lo sguardo al mio teatro della memoria (p. 226) [ My little theater […]in the style of those Renaissance fantasies where visual encyclopedias were laid out … Not so much a dwelling as a memory machine […] And so I cast my gaze on my theater of memory (p. 283)] 44 . Sadly, like the famous ancient Library of Alexandria, libraries and museums may burn and can be destroyed. The Apocalypse evoked throughout The Rose becomes a reality when Jorge da Burgos swallows the forbidden poisoned text and accidentally ends up burning the library: dell'impero", in a most fascinating and unusual illustrated volume on maps and fantastic worlds, edited by O. Calabrese, R. Giovannoli and I. Pezzini, Geografia fantastica e viaggi straordinari (Milano: Electa, 1983), pp. 84- 87. In the same volume appears Italo Calvino's "Viaggio nell'arcipelogo che non c'è", pp. 30-31. 42 See the pages on Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis beginning in Chapter 2, and especially in Chapters 82 and 83. 43 From the interview in Le Magazine Littéraire (February 1989), p. 23: "la bibliothèque c'est la mémoire de l'humanité comme l'avait compris Borges, que la bibliothèque c'est un Ersatz, un substitut de Dieu". But we should also recall Adso's definition of the library as he warns William: "The library defends itself, immeasurable as the truth it houses, deceitful as the falsehoods it preserves. A spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth. You might enter and you might not emerge" (The Rose , p. 38). 44 Eco discusses memory and specifically the various types of 'theaters of memory' in several essays (see in particular his study, La memoria vegetale, e altri saggi di bibliofilia , 2006) and in his novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana . See also my "Decoding Memorabilia in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana ", in New Essays on Umberto Eco , edited by Peter Bondanella (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 127-140. 460 ROCCO CAPOZZI

Sei tu che attendevi il suono della settima tromba, non è vero? Ascolta ora cosa dice la voce: sigilla quello che han detto i sette tuoni e non lo scrivere, prendilo e divoralo, esso amareggerà il tuo ventre ma alla tua bocca sarà dolce come il miele. Vedi? Ora sigillo ciò che non doveva essere detto, nella tomba che divento (p. 483) [You were awaiting the sound of the seventh trumpet, were you not? Now listen to what the voice says: Seal what the seven thunders have said and do not write it, take and devour it, it will make bitter your belly but to your lips it will be sweet as honey. You see? Now I seal that which was not to be said, in the grave that I become (pp. 480-481)]. Adso in his old age must reconstruct his past experiences through memories and a micro library made up of pieces of texts. The Rose , pun aside, is an echo chamber filled with words such as sign, book, library, secrets, and labyrinth ‒ all interrelated. For example, the word libro [book] that dominates in the novel, appears in the Italian original 177 times. Once we read "In the beginning there was the Word" throughout the rest of the story we are made aware that words and books rule the entire narration ‒ they are the very essence of the novel. Moreover, after the alleged second volume of Aristotle is mentioned the word book is followed by various qualifiers such as: secret, sealed, mysterious, perverse, occult, prohibited, sacred, precious, damned, lost, and fatal. It is not farfetched to think that although Eco had no intentions of excluding general readers, he may have wanted to write his first two novels more for model readers and for the pleasure of illustrating his encyclopedic competence. For example, we may agree with Eco's explanation in Postscript about Adso's love experience as a bricolage of quotations from religious texts: "a partire dal Cantico dei Cantici sino a san Bernardo e a Jean de Fecamp, o santa Hildegarda di Bingen. Almeno, anche chi non ha pratica di mistica medievale, ma un po' d'orecchio, se ne è accorto" (p. 27) [from Song of Songs to Saint Bernard and Jean de Fécamp, or Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Even readers unfamiliar with the medieval mystics realized this, if they had any ear (Postscript , p. 45)]. However, how many readers have a medieval ear and Eco's erudition and interpretative competence needed to catch all the quotations and allusions to Latin and religious texts? And we also wonder how many non critical model readers connect the final scenes of the novel, as Burgos eats the pages of the forbidden manuscript while the library burns, with a fusion of literary clichés of poisoned manuscripts and Borges' short story "Death and the Compass"? Also, in Pendulum , besides the texts quoted in the epigraphs, how many are familiar with the numerous texts dealing with the occult, cabala and the esoteric collaged in a story about a concocted plan generated by a computer called Abulafia? On the other hand, as Eco has explained in Postscript and in an interview in Le Magazine Littéraire , the different levels of double coding are there for different levels of readers. 461 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY

Foucault's Pendulum : What is Truth? Fakes, forgeries and hermetic drift

Reminiscent of XIXth century novelists Eco likes to repeat, or carry over, from one novel to the other certain elements that function as leitmotiv: authors, texts, topics, images, anecdotes and even autobiographical allusions (e.g.: fog, trumpet, Piedmont, Nerval, Athanasius Kircher, memory, rare books, libraries, museums, puns, lists, etc.). These intra-textual elements link one novel to the next and at times send the reader back to his earlier novels ‒ this is particularly true of Pendulum and The Cemetery 45 ‒ as well as in his essays going back to Opera aperta and Diario minimo . In addition to dealing with issues related to books and interpretation, investigating truths and falsehoods and identifying rationality against secrets and paranoia, several analogies link The Name of the Rose to Foucault's Pendulum . For example, for The Rose I have mentioned maps and their relationship to the Medieval notions of reading the world and nature as a book. In Pendulum the topic returns as Diotallevi states: "Riscrivere la terra come la Torah" (p. 357) [The earth could be rewritten like the Torah (p. 452)]. Also, the detective genre which for Eco is mainly a model for interpreting and making conjectures in a semiotic act of reading 46 , in Pendulum the strategies of detective fiction return once again with a twist: with the defeat of the detective. In 1972 William Spanos published a seminal article on investigating and postmodern fiction: "The Detective and the Boundary. Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination"47 . A decade later Stefano Tani in

45 We can also find analogies between The Island of the Day Before and The Cemetery , for example split selves, the double, a diary-novel within the novel, multiple narrators and flashbacks. Also, the art of forging documents and texts already present in Baudolino is fully exploited in The Cemetery . 46 U. Eco, C. Ginzburg and T. Sebeok are the authors and editors of The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). See especially Eco's "Horns, Hooves, Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of Freud , Abduction", pp.198-220. See also Carlo Ginzburg's "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method", in History Workshop , 9 (1980); see also David H. Richter's "The Mirrored World: Form and Ideology in The Name of the Rose ", in my Reading Eco , op.cit. , pp. 256-275. 47 Boundary2 , 1:1 (1972), pp. 147-168. A year earlier had appeared Michael Holquist's "Whodunit and Other questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction", New Literary History , 3:1 (1971), pp. 135-156. 462 ROCCO CAPOZZI discussing innovative anti-detective fiction 48 , seems to have inspired critics to speak about the defeat of Eco's investigators. William, Casaubon and later Roberto in The Island of the Day Before fail in their search for an order, a plan, a center, a fixed point, a Punto Fijo . It all starts with William admitting: "Mi sono comportato da ostinato, inseguendo una parvenza di ordine, quando dovevo sapere bene che non vi è ordine nell'universo" (p. 495)][I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe ( Rose , p. 492)], and continues with Casaubon admitting that there was no Plan. Eco likes to flaunt his love for the detective genre that in Postscript he calls it the most metaphysical and philosophical. As mentioned, in The Rose the investigating friar is parodically modeled after Sherlock Holmes and other famous sleuths. In Pendulum Eco speaks freely of detective stories and about investigating. Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade are mentioned several times (pp. 12, 25, 27, 393, 404). Casaubon admits to wanting to be the Sam Spade of culture and pointing to the notion of docere et delectare explains a childhood event: Avevo dieci anni e volevo che i miei mi abbonassero a un certo settimanale che pubblicava a fumetti i capolavori della letteratura... Non per tirchieria, forse per sospetto nei confronti dei fumetti, mio padre tendeva a svincolare. "Il fine di questa rivista", sentenzai allora, citando l'insegna della serie… "è in fondo quello di educare in modo piacevole" (p. 47). [When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weekly magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great classics of literature. My father, not because he was stingy, but because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. "The purpose of this magazine," I pontificated, quoting the ad, "is to educate the reader in an entertaining way". (p.49)]

For The Rose I mentioned the harmonious relationships between the structure of the novel and its content, how they complement one another and how clues for the reading(s) of the novel are found in paratextual devices even before we enter the abbey and are drawn into the intricate plot of the novel. In Foucault's Pendulum the clues begin with the first epigraph. After the title page appears a quotation from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheims De occulta philosophia that also speaks about the novel that we are about to read:

48 Stefano Tani, The Doomed detective. The Contribution of Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). See also J.C. Sarrot and L. Broche's Le roman policier historique (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011). 463 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY

Solo per voi, figli della dottrina e della sapienza, abbiamo scritto quest'opera. Scrutate il libro, raccoglietevi in quella intenzione che abbiamo dispersa e collocata in più luoghi; ciò che abbiamo occultato in un luogo, l'abbiamo manifestato in un altro, affinché possa essere compreso dalla vostra saggezza. [Only for you, children of doctrine and learning, have we written this work. Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places and gathered again; what we have concealed in one place we have disclosed in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom].

This is followed by a short anonymous epigraph from 5000 B.C.: Superstition brings bad luck. And as we read the novel we understand that it too foreshadows things to come. The third epigraph is found at the beginning of chapter one of Keter; it is in Hebrew and is not translated, it makes readers wonder about its mysterious meaning 49 . One after another the epigraphs give leading clues. They function as paratextual devices within the text at the beginning of each section/chapter. I also think that the 126 epigraphs 50 can be collaged into a decentered and rhizomatic text rich of history, fiction and humor ranging from the Bible to Woody Allen. Foucault's Pendulum is among many other things Eco's illustration of moving from Borgesian libraries (as The Rose ) to Deleuzian rhizomatic networks of associations and connections (be they free, irrational, dangerous, ludic, unlimited, and so on) within the encyclopedia of knowledge. From the image of the Sefirot Tree that precedes the title page we are expected to establish connections between Torah, auctoritas , Words of God and words of fiction. The novel also contains clever self-referential elements. For example, Casaubon explains that Belbos Abu files in the computer contain 120 quotations ‒ the same number of chapters in the novel. And concerning the Filename Abu in chapter 3, we can join the author winking at us as he makes witty references to Snoopy, Joyce, Homer, Tolstoy, several

49 The epigraph has been identified in Wikipedia as a quotation from Philip Berg's The Kabbalah: A study of the Luminous Emanation from Rabbi Isaac Luria with the Commentaries Sufficient for the Beginners , Vol II (1973). 50 There are two epigraphs after the title page and normally one for each of the 120 chapters, with the exception of Chapters 97 and 104. Readers may want to revisit the three epigraphs in Chapter 97 as each one is an intertextual echo of the other, moving from 'Exodus' to the works of Madame Blavatsky and . 464 ROCCO CAPOZZI titles of novels, the film Gone with the Wind , and to The Name of the Rose (pp. 24-27) 51 . There is a clear connection between Eco's associative interdisciplinary mind, his erudition and his love for the excess and for vertiginous intertextual references (lists of authors and books). This has become even more evident with the publication of the beautifully illustrated Le vertigini della lista (2010) 52 . The art of making lists is indeed part of a strategy that he applies right up to The Cemetery , where we find numerous lists of names, books, objects, recipes and conspiracies. At the core of the two novels are found some key elements which remain Eco's familiar and coherent narrative trademarks: accurate History, intertextuality, fusion of facts and fiction, the narrators love for the aesthetics of excess and the art of storytelling through a series of flashbacks that allows narrators to move back and forth from the present to the past.

The risk of irony and parody 53

Linda Hutcheon reminds us that "Irony's edge cuts many ways" (Irony's Edge , p. 175). This is a lesson that Casaubon and his friends learn the hard way. At the beginning of the novel Casaubon states: "Dovevo giocare con ironia, come avevo giocato sino a pochi giorni prima, senza farmi coinvolgere" (p. 15) [I had to play this ironically, as I had been playing it until a few days before, not letting myself become involved (p. 10)]. As it turns out, irony, both playful

51 Also, readers who love pop culture and Hollywood movies will enjoy the description of the bar Pilade, where the three protagonists meet. It's a pastiche of Rick's Bar from Casablanca and the bar in Star Wars : "Il bar Pilade era a quei tempi il porto franco, la taverna galattica dove gli alieni di Ophiulco, che assediavano la Terra, si incontravano senza frizioni con gli uomini dell'Impero, che pattugliavano le fasce di van Allen. […] Verso il sessantotto, e negli anni seguenti, Pilade era divenuto un Rick's Bar" (p. 50) [In those days Pilade's Bar was a free port, a galactic tavern where alien invaders from Ophiulco could rub elbows peaceably with the soldiers of the Empire patrolling the Van Alien belt. […] In '68 and in the years that followed, Pilade's became a kind of Rick's Café" (p. 60)]. 52 The Infinity of Lists is Eco's third commented illustrated anthology after the History of Beauty (2005) and of On Ugliness (2007). 53 Linda Hutcheon speaks of the "paradox" of parody and irony. See also the studies of D.C. Muecke, W. Booth, G. Almansi, and above all the more recent essays by Margaret Rose . Parody: Ancient, Modern, Postmodern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and L. Hutcheon's Irony's Edge (New York: Routledge, 1994): both have excellent bibliographical references. 465 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY and pungent, is brilliantly exploited throughout the entire narrative. But it's up to the reader to understand and appreciate the function of irony that Eco has defined within the spirit (the modus operandi ) of postmodernism (see note 35). Eco is well aware that irony can be ambiguous and that it goes beyond language, involves the author and the reader 54 and carries a risk: Ironia, gioco metalinguistico enunciazione al quadrato. Per cui se, col moderno, chi non capisce il gioco non può che rifiutarlo, col post- moderno è anche possible non capire il gioco e prendere le cose sul serio. Che è poi la qualità (il rischio) dell'ironia ( Postille , p. 39) [Irony, metalinguistic play, enunciation squared. Thus, with the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it, but with the postmodern, it is possible not to understand the game and yet to take it seriously. Which is, after all, the quality (the risk) of irony (Postscript , p. 68).

The risk of irony is very high indeed. Already with The Rose , Eco was accused of excessive relativism as a result of William declaring that there is no order, no plan, no absolute truth. Criticism from the conservative right and religious critics continued after Pendulum and it has intensified with the publication of The Prague Cemetery . The Vatican and some Jewish leaders have claimed that the average reader is not able to understand Eco's irony and may actually end up sympathizing with Simonini ‒ even though he is clearly portrayed as the biggest scoundrel in history who has forged everything that he has put his hands on and has contributed to the concoction of The Protocols of Sion . Some reviewers have gone so far as to state that Eco may unwillingly be approving of anti-Semitism 55 with a novel full of fakes and lies 56 .

54 "L'ironie est une figure ambiguë. Elle presuppose que tu connais la verité pour comprendre qu'en disant le contraire de la verité, tu fais de l'ironie. […] L'ironie est un figure ambiguë parce qu'en première instance ella va au delà du langage […] (Le Magazine Littéraire , p. 22). [Irony is an ambiguous trope. It presupposes that you know the truth in order to understand that by stating the opposite of truth, you are using irony. […] Irony is an ambiguous trope because first of all it goes beyond language)]. 55 Anthony Burgess in his excellent review of Pendulum , "A Conspiracy to Rule the World", The New York Times (15 October 1999, p. 7) mentions that "In some of the European newspapers, Mr. Eco has also been called anti- Semitic, a charge that has been thrown around irresponsibly. […] The accusation probably stems from his resurrection here of the specious Protocols of the Elders of Zion , which naturally form part of the cosmic conspiracy". Burgess also states: "For while it is not a novel in the strict sense 466 ROCCO CAPOZZI

Playful irony mixed with cynicism and satire is at the core of Pendulum . The author's criticism is directed at hermetic semiosis and against those who fall, much too easily, for the conspiracy theories concocted by Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi. Their Plan of universal control starts with the Templars and continues across the centuries with Rosecrucians, Masons, Jesuits, , the Vatican, and Jews. Gullible or paranoid readers who do not see Eco winking at them will potentially read the novel as a story about plausible conspiracy theories. In other words they will miss the satire about people who fuse and confuse history and fiction, and will overlook the author's criticism of paranoid interpretations and conspiracy theories, even though the novel is saturated with sentences containing ironic clues such as: "Io dico che esiste una società segreta con ramificazioni in tutto il mondo, che complotta per diffondere la voce che esiste un complotto universale" (p. 252) [There exists a secret society with branches throughout the world, and its plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists (p. 317)]; "Siamo stati sviati dal pensiero razionalista" (p. 318); [Weve been led astray by rationalist thought (p.401)]. The references to suspicion and freewheeling connections are numerous and include witty self-ironic statements which mirror what the three protagonists (and Eco) are doing in the novel, such as: "meglio riscrivere i libri degli altri" (p. 27); [better to rewrite the books of others (p. 23)]. But let's consider another type of parodic intertextual reference, such as:

Qualsiasi dato diventa importante se è connesso a un altro. La connessione cambia la prospettiva. Induce a pensare che ogni parvenza del mondo, ogni voce, ogni parola scritta o detta non abbia il senso che appare, ma ci parli di un Segreto. Il criterio è semplice: sospettare, of the word, it is a truly formidable gathering of information delivered playfully by a master manipulating his own invention ‒ in effect, a long, erudite joke". In many ways Burgess' review is just as valid for The Prague Cemetery . But, if Pendulum was an erudite joke (and a bad one for the three protagonists), The Cemetery is about an erudite malicious joke played on millions of people around the world. However, Eco wrote the introduction to Will Eisner's The Plot. The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2005), and certainly no one accused Eisner or Eco of anti-Semitism for that amazing graphic novel about the Protocols . 56 The debate between Eco and the Jewish leader Riccardo Di Segni, is available on line and in l'Espresso , "Eco, gli ebrei e i complotti" (28 October 2010).The strongest criticism comes from the Catholic Press, from Lucetta Scaraffia who in the L'Osservatore romano (30 October 2010) writes a bitter review of Il Cimitero making a variety of accusations including Eco's anti- Jesuit position. A few critics who joined in on the attacks blame Eco for his 'absolute relativism'. 467 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY

sospettare sempre (p. 300). [Any fact becomes important when its connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect. You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign that says No littering (p. 377)].

This type of intertextual parody works best for model readers who appreciate the parodic allusion to the hypotext (see Genette) of E.M. Forster, Howard's End (1910) 57 , while also recognizing Eco's irony directed at forgery, fakes and conspiracies in general. Naïve readers may not see the connection between constructing a narrative plot in worlds of fiction and the process of constructing an historical plot/conspiracy. Eco would consider this to be a problem for one level of readers. Indeed, model, educated and well- read readers do enjoy Eco's ironic and parodic "double voiced" discourse. Linda Hutcheon in analyzing the role of irony in Pendulum states "without irony, Eco's novel would be an exemplar of hermetic semiosis. With irony, it becomes simultaneously a critique as well as an exemplar" (Reading Eco , p. 317). This is also valid for The Cemetery of Prague ; we need only to replace hermetic semiosis with anti-Semitism and the comment is dead on. Hutcheon makes another interesting point as she links irony and ambiguity in Pendulum that is applicable to all of Eco's novels: "The pervasive irony means that ambiguity reigns" (p. 324). Indeed, a game of ambiguity in mixing truths and lies, reality and fiction, runs through Eco's narratives. Baudolino and Simonini (in The cemetery ) exemplify best this game. And we should remember that in Opera aperta (1962) Eco had already discussed how ambiguity, openness and plurality of meanings are key elements of contemporary aesthetics. Critics who label Eco a postmodernist narrator should consider that he treats postmodernism with tongue in cheek. Eco likes to keep some ambiguity about his love affair with postmodernism as he ironizes the present in the past and viceversa. Through irony and parody Eco keeps his aesthetic and critical distance from the characters and events of his possible worlds. Hutcheon summarizes the strategies of parody as she states: "Parody is … repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity", and "All

57 "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die" (p. 198). 468 ROCCO CAPOZZI parody is overtly hybrid and double-voiced"58 . Granted, this strategy may add ambiguity, but it's something that Eco plants in his narratives for readers who appreciate the art of double coding 59 . Furthermore, irony and parody for Eco are what Calvino calls "lo scudo di Perseo" [Perseus' shield] in the opening pages of Six lessons for the next millenium , used as critical and aesthetic distance and to reflect reality indirectly. In The Rose and Pendulum ambiguity begins with the title of the novels. In other words it begins with paratextual elements which may also disorient the reader. In Postscript – echoing his definition of postmodernism as a term bon a tout faire ‒ Eco explains: "mi piacque perché la rosa è una figura simbolica così densa di significati da non averne quasi più nessuno " (p. 8) [I liked it because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meaning that by now it hardly has any meaning left (p. 3)]. In Le Magazine Littéraire Eco argues that the same holds true for Foucault's Pendulum which made scholars like Hutcheon 60 think immediately of connections between the themes discussed in the novel and the topics discussed by Michel Foucault in Archeology of Knowledge , 1972 ( Archéologie du savoir , 1969) and in The Order of Things , 1973 ( Le mots e les choses , 1966) such as resemblances, analogies, similitudes, connections, sympathies, sameness, and occult parenthood. Hutcheon argues her thesis very well and as we see in On Literature Eco agrees in general with her interpretation even as he disagrees about two specific points. One, that the name Casaubon does not refer to a character from George Eliot's Middlemarch (clearly pointed out in the novel) 61 , but rather to the historical Isac Casaubon (1559-1614) who stripped the Corpus Hermeticum of its mythical status ( On Literature , p. 229), and two, that the name Foucault was meant to refer specifically to the scientist J.B. Léon Foucault (1819-1868) and to the Pendulum on display in the Conservatoire des Arts in Paris ‒ exactly where the action of the novel begins. But Eco knows very well that erudite readers will think of M. Foucault who after Les mots et les choses had become extremely popular in academic circles.

58 See Linda Hutcheon's discussion on the double voiced nature of parody in A Theory of Parody (New York-London: Metheun, 1985), p. 88, also pp. 6 and 28. 59 Eco has also dealt with double coding and the role of ambiguity in his essays On Literature and in Confessions of a Young Novelist , pp. 33-34. 60 See "Eco's Echoes: Ironizing the Postmodern", in N. Bouchard and V. Pravadelli, eds. Umberto Eco's Alternative , op. cit. , pp. 163-184; and "Iron clad Foucault" in my Reading Eco , op. cit. , pp. 312-327. 61 ''Non era un personaggio di Middlemarch ? Non so. In ogni caso era anche un filologo del Rinascimento, credo. Ma non siamo parenti" (p. 58). [Was'nt he a character in Middlemarch ?, I don't know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we are not related] (p. 63). 469 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY

Nonetheless, I feel that the main target of Eco's criticism of hermetic semiosis and drift of meaning were Derrida 62 , post-structuralists and decostructionists. In The Rose Eco historicizes the centuries-old polemics surrounding realism and nominalism; in Pendulum he translates hermetic semiosis into postmodern deconstructionist semiosis through parody and irony. Through a collage of words and texts, the three protagonists construct the Plan ‒ a conspiracy and a golem ‒ while they work on the Project Hermes for the Manutius series (see chapters 38-43). Connect, confuse and construct becomes their goal as they concoct the Plan. Casaubon states unequivocally that the idea is not to discover the Templars' secret, but to construct it. In fact two of the most recurring verbs throughout the novel are construct and connect. And so, they (con)fuse science, alchemy, magic, occult and cabala. And by allowing their imagination to dominate logic, they lose perspective of what is real and what is fiction (see the explanation in chapter 87), and even though the Plan was meant to be a joke, slowly they become like Ardenti, Aglié, Prof. Bramanti and the Diabolics ‒ they become like the lunatics that they had initially ridiculed:

Il matto invece non si preoccupa di avere una logica, procede per cortocircuiti. Tutto per lui dimostra tutto… ma il matto prima o poi tira fuori i Templari (pp. 60-61) [The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else, sooner or later he brings up the Templars (p. 67)].

In chapter 110 the three admit having abused texts and words, including those of the Bible:

Abbiamo peccato contro la Parola […]. Noi abbiamo cercato di riscrivere la Torah… Non si scherza con la Torah. Ma noi scherzavamo con la storia, con le scritture degli altri […]. E noi abbiamo cercato di parlare di libri senza amore e per irrisione […]. Manipolando le parole del Libro abbiamo costruito il Golem (pp. 444-

62 See note 22. For the discussions on Eco's Pendulum and Jacques Derrida see Robert Phiddian's "Foucault's Pendulum and the Text of Theory", in Contemporary Literature , 38: 3 (Autumn 1997), pp. 534-557; also, Norma Bouchard, "Criticfiction and Epistemes in Contemporary Literature. The Case of Foucault's Pendulum ", in Comparative Literature Studies , 32 (1995), pp. 497-513; L. Bauco and F. Millorca, Dizionario del Pendolo di Foucault (Milano: Corbo, 1989); Ruggero Puletti, La storia occulta: Il Pendolo di Foucault (Manduria-Bari: Piero Lacaita Editore, 2000). 470 ROCCO CAPOZZI

445) [ We have sinned against the Word! [...] We tried to rewrite the Torah [...]. You don't joke with the Torah. We were joking with history, with other people's writing […]. But we approached books without love, in mockery [...]. Manipulating the words of the book, we attempted to construct a Golem […] (pp. 564, 565, 566).

Diotallevi also suggest that he is dying as a result of their sins in tampering with the Word, or, if we wish, in joking with (laughing at) power, order, and God. This echoes Jorge of Burgos' warning to William against turning the world upside down by desecrating authority (of God) by means of laughter (comedy; Bakhtin). As we recall, the three have fun with cute jokes like: IBM: Iesus Babbage Mundi, Iesus Binarium Magnificamur (p. 474). However, repeated lies, obsessions, desecration, the carnevalesque, just like laughter, can be infectious and ultimately even dangerous. A message that returns in The Cemetery of Prague where Simonini forges all sorts of texts letters and documents to concoct a more evil plan that will cause the death of many innocent people ‒ a bad joke, a hoax that in the words of Norman Cohn becomes "a warrant for a genocide"63 . In Pendulum we find organizations such as those of Templars and Masons, in Cemetery it is mainly the Masons and the Jews who allegedly are planning to rule the world. Simonini seems to follow Casaubon's ironic realization that was first suggested by Lia: "La gente è affamata di piani, se gliene offri uno ci si getta sopra come una muta di lupi. Tu inventi e loro credono" (p. 490) [People are starved for plans. If you offer them one, they fall on it like a pack of wolves. You invent, and they believe (p. 618)]. Soon after, Casaubon admits: "Ma se inventando un piano gli altri lo realizzano, il Piano è come se ci fosse, anzi, ormai c'è" (p. 490). [But if you invent a plan others carry it out, it's as if the Plan exists. At this point it does exist (p. 619)]. And so there are responsibilities for those who concoct plans, even as a joke. It's an issue that returns in The Cemetery of Prague. The theological discussions on atheism and God are central in all of Eco's novels. In Pendulum some ambiguity derives from the fact that these discussions are mixed with allusions to unlimited interpretations, hermetic semiosis and about the willingness of people to believe in anything. In other words if nothing or everything is true then everything is allowed. This is a key message summarized in chapter 118 which begins with the epigraph citing Karl Poppers Conjectures and refutations : "The conspiracy theory of society […] comes from abandoning God and then asking: Who is in his place?" (p. 617). Eco fully agrees with G.K. Chesterton's alleged aphorism: "When people cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything". The three protagonists end up believing in their own constructed Plan and it is their golem (their own powerful, uncontrollable and dangerous

63 Norman Cohn, The Protocols: Warrant for Genocide (London, 1966). 471 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY

Frankenstein) that kills them: Diotallevi is dying of a cancer, Belbo is hung in the Conservatoire and Casaubon, in the closing page of the novel waits for his killers in the hills of Piedmont. Chesterton's aphorism about God in all of Eco's novels is also applicable to the belief that when people lose sight of History than they believe in everything that a society of spectacle and simulations presents as reality. Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi are protagonists and victims of an invented fiction derived from their rewriting History ‒ a possible world that attracts lunatics and fanatics from around the world who will fall prey to conspiracy theories dating as far back as the Templars. They, like Eco, are concerned with the proliferation of texts on esotericism. Books like The Baphomet by Pierre Klossowski (1965), The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (1975), and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh (1987) are just three of the numerous texts that have generated an industry of essays and mystery novels around the world dealing with coded messages, secret societies, conspiracies and plans for controlling the world. One needs only to see how many historical mystery novels and movies dealing with Templars, Masons, conspiracies, the Bible, and the art of deciphering coded messages have appeared around the world and how often on the cover one finds references to Umberto Eco and Dan Brown as comparisons 64 . Pendulum , however, more than a thriller and a

64 The spin-off novels range from being complex and refined as is the case with Q (1999 ) written by the group of writers Luther Blisset (now known as Wu Ming), or The Rule of Four (2004) by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, to more popular novels like Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Dumas Club (1993), or Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club (2003). There are also numerous dime novels about Templars, art of decoding, and historical mystery stories that we see in Spain from writers like Matilde Asensi, Julia Navarro, Javier Sierra, or José Carlos Somoza. From Portugal we find José Rodriguez Dos Santos. In Italy Giulio Leoni has written a series of mystery stories with Dante as investigator, perhaps imitating not just Eco but also the Canadian writer Margaret Doody and her series of novels about Aristotle as a detective. The list of authors and novels is very long. Templars seem to have remained popular and continue to attract interest. In Italy the respected journalist Franco Cuomo published Gunther d'Amalfi. Cavaliere Templare (1989) starting a wave of novels that see a variety of historical figures, including Christopher Columbus as a Templar. See the novel of Ruggero Marino, Colombo e il Papa tradito (1991) and Colombo ultimo Templare (2005), and the fascinating novel of J.R. Dos Santos, Codex 632 (2005). Films, TV shows and bestselling novels like Raymond Khoury's The Last Templar (2005) continue to fascinate the public. 472 ROCCO CAPOZZI divertissement noir, is a bitter satire against falsehoods and lies perpetuated by circular thinking that gullible people continue to accept as truth 65 ‒ a central topic that returns in Il cimitero di Praga . Just as interesting, what Eco says about diabolicals and lunatics in Pendulum : "I libri dei diabolici non debbono innovare, debbono ripetere il già detto" (p. 490). [The books of the Diabolicals must not innovate; they must repeat what has already been said (p. 618)]. He also talks about secrets and secret agents in The Cemetery 66 . Academics, for the right reasons, have examined how in Pendulum we find intellectual discussions on postmodernism, hermetic semiosis, unlimited interpretations, Foucault, Derrida and so on. However, Eco also emphasizes the dangers of paranoia, conspiracy theories and of people trying to rewrite history that he also treats passionately in The Cemetery of Prague . And as Eco has also argued in A passo di gambero , these old problems will continue until people, less ignorant of History, are able to learn from past mistakes and rely on knowledge and reason rather than on paranoia. The world is full of people like Colonel Ardenti, Aglié and the members of the Picatrix Club who believe in the reincarnation of the Count de Saint Germain, in Cagliostro, and in conspiracy theories. Are these people fanatics and gullible or are they simply uninformed and thus ready to accept any theory and any outlandish idea that the media and mediatic discourse sells as reality. The so-called reality shows on TV come immediately to mind. Guy Debord (see The Society of the Spectacle , 1967) is absolutely right in suggesting that the spectacular culture machinery (see axiom 157) has altered our views of what is reality and what is media constructed. A view fully

65 A topic that Eco has treated from The Rose to The Cemetery , and has discussed it in "The Power of Falsehood" (On Literature , pp. 272-301). As I complete this article I see that in his bi-weekly commentaries in "La Bustina di Minerva", Eco is again speaking against the confusion of truth and lies by the media: "In Rete, sui giornali e perfino nei libri circola ormai una quantità incredibile di falsi. Orientarsi è difficile, ma ci si deve difendere. Magari con la diffidenza. Perché non è vero che non ci sia più confine tra verità e menzogna", in l'Espresso (29 April 2011). The whole issue of truth and lies is treated extremely well by the novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in her review of The Prague Cemetery , "The Deadliest Hoax", in The New York Time Book Review , Sunday 20 November 2011, a review ‒ I must add ‒ that takes us back to Burgess' outstanding review of Pendulum (see note 60) on hoax and truth. 66 "I servizi segreti di ciascun paese credono solo a ciò che hanno sentito dire altrove e respingerebbero come inattendibile ogni notizia del tutto inedita" (p. 211). [The secret service in each country believes only what it has already heard elsewhere and would discount as unreliable any information that is entirely new, pp. 178-179] 473 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY shared by the writer Mario Vargas Llosa who more recently has been arguing the dangers of confusing reality and simulation in a society dominated by the media (e.g. in La civilizacion del espetàculo , 2012). Eco's Pendulum with its encyclopedia of esoteric texts should make readers think about what is going on in today's society and not simply what happens to three protagonists who construct a Plan, lose sight of common sense and become like Colonel Ardenti. The final message of Foucault's Pendulum is clear: what could very well be a shopping or laundry list 67 ‒ as pointed out to them by Lia, a woman advocating common sense ‒ should not be taken to be a ciphered message containing a secret linked to a secret plan of world domination, simply because the writing is unreadable (pp. 383-384). Suspicion and irrationality are to be blamed. Midway through the novel Casaubon admits:

Quando ci si mette in uno stato di sospetto non si trascura più nessuna traccia. Dopo le fantasticherie sull'albero motore ero disposto a vedere signature rivelatrici in ogni oggetto che mi capitasse tra le mani (p. 303). [When you assume an attitude of suspicion, you overlook no clue. After our fantasy on the power train and the Tree of the Sefirot, I was prepared to see symbols in every object I came upon (p. 381)].

In terms of the importance of History, in Pendulum the events refer specifically to a time frame that goes from the days of the student revolution of 1968 to June 23, 1984. There are also plenty of digressions sending the reader back to the Middle Ages, to the Crusades, to the history of the Templars and to the death of their last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay in 1314, as a result of the alliance of Pope Clement and King Philip le Bel who decided to dissolve their order (see chapter 14). But overall Eco speaks with great irony about how people ignore History: "Suvvia, un cabalista non crede alla storia …. .. tutto si ripete in circolo, la storia è maestra perché ci insegna che non c'è (p. 87)". [Come now, cabalists don't believe in history … Everything is repeated in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist (p. 102)].

In The Rose and Pendulum we notice how often Eco is concerned with problems related to defining truth. In Pendulum for example, Aglié thinks that he is quoting Pontius Pilate but he may be actually quoting Francis Bacon's

67 At the beginning of the novel Casaubon hiding in the Conservatoire des Arts confesses: "L'unica cosa che in quei momenti non ti tradisce è la lista della lavandaia" (p. 21) [The only thing you can rely on at a time like this is the laundry list. (p.17)] 474 ROCCO CAPOZZI essay Of Truth "68 . Eco's choice is to let readers investigate what is truth and to decode the ambiguity intentionally left in the text. He trusts that readers will apply their critical capacity and "arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text" (see Pendulum , p. 459). This process is brilliantly summarized at the conclusion of The Rose : "Forse il compito di chi ama gli uomini è di far ridere della verità, fare ridere la verità , perché l'unica verità è imparare a liberarsi dalla passione insana per la verità" (p. 494). [Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh , because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth (p. 491)]. To be noted that the emphasis in italics is Eco's. For convenience or for lack of any other definition Eco's intellectual mystery novels have frequently been labelled as postmodern fictions. Is it because postmodernism is also associated with desecration and transgression of boundaries of historical chronology, genres and disciplines? Eco's novels certainly do all that, combining playfulness and erudition. I have often referred to his novels as encyclopedic hybrid fictions and given their structures I consider his novels to be what Omar Calabrese would define as dynamic neo-baroque 69 constructions. Eco's novels are not easy page turners, they are erudite double coded divertissements constructed as machines for generating interpretations. Most of all, they are cognitive instruments saturated with information and popular culture so that various levels of readers will find them to be educational and enjoyable. Eco loves to construct possible worlds of fiction that unravel hidden or forgotten truths pertinent to the present for their clear and pervasive influence on both the social and philosophical realms. His novels, always ludic and instructive, appeal to readers who enjoy parody, irony, hunting for sources and allusions, but ultimately they are texts for disseminating knowledge by activating associations of words, images, ideas, characters, events, cultural-historical phenomena and innumerable other texts. Indeed, while reading Eco's novels one is tempted to connect to the internet, to the electronic universal encyclopedia, in order to check out names, dates, titles,

68 Bacon's essay "Of Truth" is on line, it begins: "what is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer". In addition to the epigraph from The New Atlantis , Bacon is mentioned several times in Pendulum (see note 48). Casaubon states "I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript" (p. 51). 69 Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque. A sign of the Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). On the relationships between postmodernism and architecture, in addition to Jencks we should also consider the influence of Paolo Portoghesi's After Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1982) and Le inibizioni dell'architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1979). 475 UMBERTO ECO'S COGNITIVE HYBRID NOVELS: THE VERTIGO OF INTERTEXTUALITY and so on. Inquisitive readers willing to learn historical and cultural facts will undoubtedly enjoy reading Eco as much as Eco enjoys writing his novels while winking at his readers ‒ model or otherwise.

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