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Biblioteca Di Rivista Di Studi Italiani BIBLIOTECA DI RIVISTA DI STUDI ITALIANI CONTRIBUTI 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 Umberto Eco'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 (Paris: 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.
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