Directed by Davide Ferrario
Starring Walter Leonardi, Giuseppe Cederna, Niccolò Ferrero, Paolo Giangrasso, Zoe Tavarelli, Mariella Valentini
The documentary serves as a loving portrait of a brilliant mind and a testament to the enduring power of literature and knowledge, often featuring scenes of the author navigating his labyrinthine, book-lined shelves.
"Scenes of the author navigating his labyrinthine, book-lined shelves" - I guess that was what really clinched the deal for me. I was ready to plank down money just to see what the inside of Umberto Eco's library - and, by extension, his head - might look like.
Was I disappointed? A little bit, yes. His family, who seemed to be out in force - his widow, their children, grandchildren, the whole nine yards - boasted that his collection held "30,000 books" ... together with an inner snctum where a couple of hundred "really rare and valuable" treasures were held.
But that's not much! I've got 20,000 books myself - or so my last catalogue count confirmed - and I, too, have picked up some (donatable) rarities here and there along the way.
White utilitarian shelves, built from floor to ceiling, were to be seen winding along long circuitous corridors. There was a system there: a rough arrangement according to language and literature, but nothing too tediously minute.
But then Eco himself said something interesting about them: "None of the books here are true."
True ... what exactly did he mean by that? Eco went on to claim that he had no real interest in atlases, scientific treatises, or other works containing accurate information. All he was interested in was lies.
There were no works by Galileo in his collection - but lots by Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. There were no reliable atlases: only maps full of hazy guesses at the terra incognita beyond their boundaries.
And, of course, his collection included lots of fiction: but no genuine history.
The film went on to break down his interests into the following three categories: Memories, Fictions, and Lies. This, however, isn't so much a review of Davide Ferrario's fascinating documentary as some thoughts of my own on those three themes.
A few nights ago I had a dream where I was walking around some unfamiiliar townscape with a group of (I think) visiting scholars, all the while lecturing them about Ausonius. Or, rather, not so much about Ausonius himself as the fact that, as one of the last of the classical Roman poets, his work seems mostly redolent to us now of the oncoming end - the crossing of the Rhine into Gaul by the Visigoths, which duly took place in 406, a few years after his death. Alaric the Goth sacked Rome in 410.
But why Ausonius? The name is not really familiar to me. I had to establish that there actually was such a person when I woke up next morning. I eventually discovered that I owned some translations of his work in the Penguin Last Poets of Imperial Rome collection:
What's more, that inspired translator and poet Helen Waddell included a few of his shorter poems, including the most famous, "De rosis nascentibus" [On Budding Roses] in her book Mediaeval Latin Lyrics:
De rosis nascentibus Ver erat et blando mordentia frigora sensu spirabat croceo mane revecta dies. strictior Eoos praecesserat aura iugales, aestiferum suadens anticipare diem. errabam riguis per quadrua compita in hortis, maturo cupiens me vegetare die. vidi concretas per gramina flexa pruinas pendere aut holerum stare cacuminibus, caulibus et patulis teretes conludere guttas ... vidi Paestano gaudere rosaria cultu exoriente novo roscida Lucifero. rara pruinosis canebat gemma frutectis ad primi radios interitura die. ambigeres raperetne rosis Aurora ruborem an daret et flores tingeret orta dies. ros unus, color unus, et unum mane duorum: sideris et floris nam domina una Venus. forsan et unus odor: sed celsior ille per auras difflatur, spirat proximus iste magis. communis Paphie dea sideris et dea floris praecipit unius muricis esse habitum. momentum intererat quo se nascentia florum germina comparibus dividerent spatiis. haec viret angusto foliorum tecta galero, hanc tenui filo purpura rubra notat, haec aperit primi fastigia celsa obelisci, mucronem absolvens purpurei capitis. vertice collectos illa exinuabat amictus, iam meditans foliis se numerare suis. nec mora: ridentis calathi patefecit honorem, prodens inclusi stamina densa croci. haec, modo quae toto rutilaverat igne comarum, pallida conlapsis deseritur foliis. mirabar celerem fugitiva aetate rapinam, et dum nascuntur consenuisse rosas. ecce et defluxit rutili coma punica floris dum loquor, et tellus tecta rubore micat. tot species tantosque ortus variosque novatus una dies aperit, conficit ipsa dies. conquerimur, Natura, brevis quod gratia florum: ostentata oculis ilico dona rapis. quam longa una dies, aetas tam longa rosarum, quas pubescentes iuncta senecta premit. quam modo nascentem rutilus conspexit Eoos, hanc rediens sero vespere vidit anum. sed bene quod paucis licet interitura diebus succedens aevum prorogat ipsa suum. collige, virgo, rosas dum flos novus et nova pubes, et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum.• On Newbblown Roses Spring, and the sharpness of the golden dawn. Before the sun was up a cooler breeze Had blown, in promise of a day of heat, And I was walking in my formal garden, To freshen me, before the day grew old. I saw the hoar frost stiff on the bent grasses, Sitting in fat globes on the cabbage leaves, And all my Paestum roses laughing at me, Dew-drenched, and in the East the morning star, And here and there a dewdrop glistening white, That soon must perish in the early sun. Think you, did Dawn steal colour from the roses, Or was it new born day that stained the rose? To each one dew, one crimson, and one morning, To star and rose, their lady Venus one. Mayhap one fragrance, but the sweet of Dawn Drifts through the sky, and closer breathes the rose. A moment dies: this bud that was new born Has burgeoned even fold on even fold; This still is green, with her close cap of leaves, This shows a red stain on her tender sheath. This the first crimson of the loosened bud; And now she thinks to unwind her coverings, And lo! the glory of the radiant chalice, Scattering the close seeds of her golden heart. One moment, all on fire and crimson glowing, All pallid now and bare and desolate. I marvelled at the flying rape of time; But now a rose was born: that rose is old. Even as I speak the crimson petals float Down drifting, and the crimsoned earth is bright. So many lovely things, so rare, so young, A day begat them, and a day will end. O Earth, to give a flower so brief a grace! As long as a day is long, so long the life of a rose. The golden sun at morning sees her born, And late at eve returning finds her old. Yet wise is she, that hath so soon to die, And lives her life in some succeeding rose. O maid, while youth is with the rose and thee, Pluck thou the rose: life is as swift for thee.
Carpe diem - Seize (or "pluck") the day - Cueillez dés aujourd'huy les roses de la vie ... it's not an unfamiliar sentiment. Ausonius didn't originate it, nor is he its most famous exponent. It would have to be seen as one of the best poems inspired by the idea, though. And it does have an extra resonance because of the devastation of Ausonius's own comfortable and familiar Roman world which was so shortly to come.
But why on earth did he turn up in my dream? Did I read about him in one of Christopher de Hamel's books about illuminated manuscripts? Did his name stick in my mind from some list of minor latin poets? Because he is a minor poet: when set alongside the giants - Horace, Ovid, Virgil - of the golden age, that is.
But he wrote about rivers, the Moselle in particular, and about viticulture, and about his own daily life. There can be worse legacies to leave to posterity.
I guess I'm particularly fond of my old Penguin edition of Medieval Latin Lyrics - I have another as well, a hardback copy - because it belonged to my Scottish grandmother. It's had a hard life. Perhaps it was left out at the rain at some point, as the pages are quite stiff and stained. But it makes me think of her. I wouldn't have picked her as a poetry lover, exactly, but something in Waddell's lyrics - or perhaps the Latin text en face - must have appealed to her for some reason.
The book dates from 1952. I see from the date inside that she gave it to me in 1979, a decade or so before her death (at a feisty 96): "Pluck thou the rose: life is as swift for thee."
Does the idea of a library devoted to lies and misconceptions sound rather silly to you? It did to me, too - at first.
But then I started to realise just how revealing such memory palaces can be. We all like to think that we live in a world where "scientific method" can be employed to reveal, however gradually, the objective truth of things. This comfortable certainty begins to leak away the more we examine the ideological underpinnings of particular scientists' work, however.
One interesting example is the (unfortunately named) American anthropologist Carleton Coon. In a previous blogpost, I quoted from his notorious book The Origin of Races (1962), which argued:
that the human species divided into five races before it had evolved into Homo sapiens. Further, he suggested that the races evolved into Homo sapiens at different times.I went on to say that even though Coon claimed
that he had been prompted purely by a desire to follow the evidence where it led, many of his contemporaries saw this idea as providing fuel for white segregationists and racists generally. Was Coon himself a racist? He, and most of his colleagues, have continued to deny the suggestion indignantly.
I did once see a documentary on the subject, though, where one of those colleagues summed up his feelings more or less as follows: he said that Coon had travelled to every corner of the globe, had met people of all races, worked and interacted with them, and lived among them. Many of them had become his close friends. And yet, he concluded, "I don't think for a moment that it ever occurred to Carleton S. Coon to regard any of them as his equals."
This section of my post prompted a lively debate in the comments section.
One commentator claimed that the quote sounded:
more like personal vanity or arrogance than racism ... It may even be an occupational deformity of anthropologists to see all races or cultures as inferior because they lack some of the qualities of others.To which I responded:
Yes, and that's certainly how I took the comment at the time. Reading about him further on his wikipedia page, though, I did find the following:I wrote the post in question in 2019. I can see now that a great deal more on the subject has become available on Coon's wikipedia page, grouped under the heading "Debate on Race":"In 2001, John P. Jackson, Jr. researched Coon's papers to review the controversy around the reception of The Origin of Races, stating in the article abstract:This claim, too, is controversial, but it seems that Coon was indeed sympathetic to the segregationist, anti-civil rights cause in the 1960s, and therefore his apologists cannot really continue to claim that it was science alone that inspired his conclusions.Segregationists in the United States used Coon's work as proof that African Americans were 'junior' to white Americans, and thus unfit for full participation in American society. The paper examines the interactions among Coon, segregationist Carleton Putnam, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and anthropologist Sherwood Washburn. The paper concludes that Coon actively aided the segregationist cause in violation of his own standards for scientific objectivity."
Privately, Coon suspected [British-American anthropologist] Ashley Montagu (a target of McCarthyism) of communist sympathies and of turning Dobzhansky and others against him. As late as 1977, he was quoted as saying to a colleague, "You had Ashley Montagu in your office? And you didn't shoot him?" The enmity was reciprocated; in a 1974 letter to Stephen Jay Gould, Montagu wrote, "Coon ... is a racist and an antisemite, as I know well, so when you describe Coon's letter to the editor of Natural History as 'amusing' I understand exactly what you mean — but it is so in exactly the same sense as Mein Kampf was 'amusing'."Whether Coon was the exception or the rule, such case-studies could be multiplied in virtually every area of science: influential scholars using their reputations to stifle debate and dissent as long as they possibly can ...
Jack Ross: The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006)Cover illustration: Marcantonio Raimondi / Cover design: James Fryer
One of my own attempts at a "novel of ideas" set out to examine this problem of the danger of making seemingly logical deductions from faulty premises. I called it The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis.
I'll quote from the blurb:
WHAT IF you awoke to find yourself alone on a beach, with no memory of how you got there? No memory of how you got there, or of anything else in your past?"GIGO", as they used to say. "Garbage In, Garbage Out." If your initial premises are shaky - as they virtually always are - so too will be your conclusions. Is Auckland Atlantis? Was there ever a real "Atlantis"? These are not really useful questions to ask. You have to start far further back than that if you want to achieve anything substantive in the way of thinking.
WHAT IF a young girl found you (like Nausicäa), and took you back to her house (like Odysseus)?
WHAT IF you started to scan the books she had for clues to where – and who – you were?
WHAT IF those books were New Age texts about the mysteries of the unseen world, the supernatural, Atlantis?
WHAT IF that’s where you assumed you were? That this strange new world, New Zealand, was indeed Plato’s fabled lost continent?
Auckland’s triple-ringed harbours and sun-dappled streets provide an unexpected backdrop to the Imaginary Museum of Atlantis in Jack Ross’s new story, a successor to Nights with Giordano Bruno (described by Alan Brunton as “this crazy, obsessively sexual novel … an echo in Auckland of Eco …”).
Rather than "wasting time" with ephemeral cultural productions - such as comics and B-movies - Umberto Eco saw from the beginning that they formed a great part - possibly the major part - of the underpinning of our ideas. Hence his late masterpiece The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, where an elderly bookseller suffering from memory loss caused by a stroke plunders the details of everything he's ever read or seen to try and reconstruct a single image: the face of the girl he has loved ever since he was a student.
Some fifteen years back I collaborated on a project with Māori artist and curator Karl Chitham.
Jack Ross & Karl Chitham. Fallen Empire: Maui in the Underworld, Kupe & the Fountain of Youth, Hatupatu & the Nile-monster: Three Play-Fragments from the Literary Remains of The Society of Inner Light. Attributed to Bertolt Wegener. Edited with an introduction by Jack Ross. Museum of True History in Collaboration with Karl Chitham and Jack Ross (20 June – 21 July 2012). Dunedin: Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2012.Fallen Empire, as Karl called it, was an outgrowth of his work on the (so-called) "Museum of True History" (or MOTH), which still survives in a few online remnants here and there.
MOTH was a deliberately post-colonial project, designed to encourage the creation of fabricated artefacts with interesting (false) histories, each with a kind of satirical sting in the tail. Costa Botes & Peter Jackson's faux-documentary Forgotten Silver is perhaps the most celebrated local predecessor for this kind of fabular invented past:
Even this comparatively light-hearted fantasia caused a great deal of furore when it was screened without warning on local TV, however. Virtually everyone who saw it seems to have been fooled by it, and many were distinctly unamused at discovering it was a hoax.
For my own part, I almost wished - at the time, and subsequently - that I could have fallen for it. It seemed to me so patently absurd from the very first minutes, that I viewed it as obvious satire. But I suppose that an apprenticeship with the works of Barth and Pynchon, along with many other postmodern luminaries, had already taught me to take even the most plausible inventions with a grain of salt.
I enjoyed working with Karl, and greatly admired his clever design for our (imaginary) "Society of Inner Light"'s private theatre, as well as his beautiful character studies for various of the main roles in the surviving fragments of their plays.
What I didn't enjoy, though, was the aftermath.
The exhibition opening, at Dunedin's Blue Oyster Art Project Space went off well enough, but it was afterwards, when we were chatting with some of the more earnest local art enthusiasts who'd attended the show that I began to get a bad feeling about the whole thing.
So many of them seemed to take it literally. They didn't say so directly, but I got a strong impression that some of them actually believed that there really had been a Society of Inner Light in Raetihi at some point, and that these fabricated texts of mine were serious works of art which would repay careful reading.
I really didn't know what to say: I wanted to burst out: "It's all lies. None of it's true. Don't waste any more of your precious time on it." But I found I couldn't.
For a start, it would have negated the whole ethos of Karl's carefully contrived thought experiment. Also, it would have been tantamount to calling them naive simpletons. No matter how tactfully I tried to put it, it would have sounded as if I'd set out to fool them just for my own amusement: to have the fun of laughing in their faces afterwards.
I felt terrible. Luckily the show's afterlife did not last long, so I was able to retreat to my study and try and pretend that the whole thing never happened.
I still feel that MOTH had some valuable things to say about the appropriation of artistic and mythological tropes by the European culture machine, but I realised afterwards that I'd counted all along on Karl's considerable mana to justify my own part in this exercise. Clearly this wasn't the way to do it.
Telling lies in the guise of fiction is one thing. Telling lies backed up by (fabricated) history is something else. The horrible example of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion is always before us. Much of the actual text of this work began as:
Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu [Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu], an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly; [along with] a chapter from Biarritz, an 1868 novel by the antisemitic German novelist Hermann Goedsche.That alone should be enough to remind us just how dangerous such concoctions can be.
As long as we all know what playing field we're on - whether it be satirical, philosophical, or metafictional - it can seem like quite an innocent game. Karl, too, seems to have moved on now from MOTH - perhaps because of some awkward conversations like the ones in Dunedin. I don't for a moment think that either he or I have done anything to be ashamed of. Every artistic career should contain a hoax or two. But I doubt that either of us would feel comfortable doing such a thing again.
The stakes seem too high nowadays. And even the implication of mockery is something I would hate to be associated with unnecessarily.
Books I own are marked in bold:
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Novels:
- Il nome della rosa (1980)
- The Name of the Rose. 1980. Trans. William Weaver. 1983. London: Picador, 1984.
- Il pendolo di Foucault (1988)
- Foucault's Pendulum. 1988. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.
- L'isola del giorno prima (1994)
- The Island of the Day Before. 1994. Trans. William Weaver. 1995. Minerva. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1996.
- Baudolino (2000)
- Baudolino. 2000. Trans. William Weaver. 2001. London: Vintage Books, 2003.
- La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (2004)
- The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. 2004. Trans. Geoffrey Brock. 2005. London: Vintage Books, 2006.
- Il cimitero di Praga (2010)
- The Prague Cemetery. 2010. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2011.
- Numero zero (2015)
- Numero Zero. 2015. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Vintage, 2015.
- Il problema estetico in San Tommaso (1956)
- The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (1988)
- "Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale", in Momenti e problemi di storia dell'estetica (1959)
- Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1985)
- Opera aperta (1962)
- The Open Work (1989)
- Diario Minimo (1963)
- Misreadings. 1963. Trans. William Weaver. 1993. London: Picador, 1994.
- Apocalittici e integrati (1964)
- Apocalypse Postponed (1994)
- Le poetiche di Joyce (1965)
- The Middle Ages of James Joyce: The Aesthetics of Chaosmos (1989)
- La Struttura Assente (1968)
- Il costume di casa (1973)
- Travels in Hyperreality: Essays [aka Faith in Fakes]. 1973. Trans. William Weaver. 1986. London: Picador, 1987.
- Il segno (1973)
- Trattato di semiotica generale (1975)
- A Theory of Semiotics (1976)
- Il Superuomo di massa (1976)
- Come si fa una tesi di laurea (1977)
- How to Write a Thesis (2015)
- Dalla periferia dell'impero (1977)
- "Lector in fabula", in A Semiotic Landscape. Panorama sémiotique. Proceedings of the 1st Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Approaches to Semiotics, 29. Ed. with Seymour Chatman & Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (1979)
- The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts [Essays from Opera aperta, 1962; Apocalittici e integrati, 1964; Forme del contenuto, 1971; Il Superuomo di massa, 1976; Lector in Fabula, 1979] (1979)
- Sette anni di desiderio (1983)
- Postille al nome della rosa (1983)
- Reflections on The Name of the Rose. 1983. Trans. William Weaver. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.
- Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio (1984)
- Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
- De Bibliotheca (1986)
- Lo strano caso della Hanau 1609 (1989)
- L'Enigme de l'Hanau 1609 (1990)
- I limiti dell'interpretazione (1990)
- The Limits of Interpretation (1990)
- [with R. Rorty, J. Culler, C. Brooke-Rose] Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Ed. S. Collini (1992)
- Il secondo diario minimo (1992)
- How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays (1998)
- La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (1993)
- The Search for the Perfect Language. 1993. Trans. James Fentress. 1995. Fontana Press. London: HarperCollins, 1997.
- Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994)
- Ur Fascism (1995)
- Eternal Fascism [aka How to Spot a Fascist] (1995)
- Incontro – Encounter – Rencontre (1996)
- [with Carlo Maria Martini] In cosa crede chi non crede? (1996)
- Belief or Nonbelief? A Dialogue (2000)
- Cinque scritti morali (1997)
- Five Moral Pieces (2001)
- Kant e l'ornitorinco (1997)
- Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition. 1997. Trans. Alastair McEwen. 1999. London: Vintage Books, 2000.
- Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (1998)
- La bustina di Minerva (1999)
- Experiences in Translation (2000)
- Experiences in Translation. Toronto Italian Studies. Trans. Alastair McEwen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
- Sugli specchi e altri saggi (2002)
- Sulla letteratura (2003)
- On Literature. 2002. Trans. Martin McLaughlin. 2004. London: Vintage Books, 2006.
- Mouse or Rat?: Translation as Negotiation (2003)
- Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. 2003. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books, Ltd. 2004.
- [with Girolamo de Michele] Storia della bellezza (2004)
- On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea. 2002. Trans. Alastair McEwen. Secker & Warburg. London: Random House, 2004.
- A passo di gambero. Guerre calde e populismo mediatico (2006)
- Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism. 2005. Trans. Alastair McEwen. 2006. Vintage. London: Random House, 2008.
- Storia della bruttezza (2007)
- On Ugliness. 2007. Trans. Alastair McEwen. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2007.
- Dall'albero al labirinto: studi storici sul segno e l'interpretazione (2007)
- From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation (2014)
- La Vertigine della Lista (2009)
- The Infinity of Lists (2009)
- Costruire il nemico e altri scritti occasionali (2011)
- Inventing the Enemy and Other Occasional Writings. 2011. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2012.
- Storia delle terre e dei luoghi leggendari (2013)
- The Book of Legendary Lands. 2013. Trans. Alastair McEwen. Rizzoli Ex Libris. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2013.
- Pape Satàn Aleppe: Cronache di una società liquida (2016)
- Chronicles of a Liquid Society. 2016. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Penguin Random House, 2017.
- Sulle spalle dei giganti (2017)
- On the Shoulders of Giants. Trans. Alastair McEwen (2019)
- [with Thomas A. Sebeok] The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1984)
- [with Eugenio Carmi] La bomba e il generale (1966)
- The Bomb and the General. Illustrated by Eugenio Carmi. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.
- [with Eugenio Carmi] I tre cosmonauti (1966)
- The Three Cosmonauts. Illustrated by Eugenio Carmi (1989)
- [with Eugenio Carmi] Gli gnomi di Gnu (1992)
- The Gnomes of Gnu Bompiani. Illustrated by Eugenio Carmi (1992)
Non-fiction:
Edited:
Children's Books:
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