Eco All in All

Since people speak, to explain why and how they speak cannot help but determine their future way of speaking. At any rate, I can hardly deny that it determines my own way of speaking.¹

One of the pleasures of reading Umberto Eco is the gradual realisation that he works hard at capturing his readers' attention and engagement. He uses different methods to shift his tone and style, for example, and during his career worked in a variety of different genres, such as literary theory, semiotic philosophy, newspaper columns, television appearances,² and novels to make his arguments. Often, Eco's intentional pleasure is based on elaborate games, puzzles, and a plain, if pertinent, telling of jokes:

While I say many things … there are many more that I don't say, simply because my ideas are not clear in that regard. In fact, I should like to take as my motto a quotation from Boscoe Pertwee, an eighteenth-century author … 'I used to be indecisive but now I'm not so sure'.³

Eco shows his own enjoyment in thinking, writing and talking, giving his audiences different stimuli (intellectual, conversational, humorous, modest) to respond to. Certainly, these tactics, combined with genuine talent and erudition, helped him transcend any single context, and they go a long way to explain his later fame as a popular, if also demanding, novelist.

In Umberto Eco, the Da Vinci Code, and the Intellectual in the Age of Popular Culture, Douglass Merrell sets out to capture the essence of Eco's cross-cultural, elite yet popular appeal. His book marks the first sustained effort to trace Eco's intellectual biography (as opposed to the coverage in newspaper obituaries) since his death in 2016, aged 84. Merrell compares Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003) to Eco's debut novel The Name of the Rose (1980): while noting that both books were bestsellers, Merrell contrasts Brown's seduction of credulous readers, fascinated by conspiracy theories, with Eco's fusion of detective plotting and medieval intrigue, on the one hand, and intricate philosophical challenges on the other. Brown's readers, Merrell argues, consume his fiction, eager to be thrilled, while Eco's readers initially enjoy the shock of murder and mystery, but are then led deeper into questions without clear answers, right up to and beyond the ending (the novel's title, for example, is never explained).

Eco was not content with mass popularity alone (though he never exactly complained about it); his readers also had to think:

Eco … developed a distinctive practice as a public intellectual by imposing rigorous demands on a popular readership. He leads them through an unresolved maze of dense historical references and arcane conceptions to arouse an awareness of the fallacy of seeking a tidy narrative closure … These efforts are intended to entertain a popular readership in the broadest sense such that their initial hopes for enjoyment … are overturned but their full engagement … will bring about a transformative awareness.

(p. 274)

Eco championed the attainment of critical consciousness, writing not only to entertain and educate, but to change minds. This effort is evident throughout his fiction, from his debut novel through to Foucault's Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), The Prague Cemetery (2010), and others. In Foucault's Pendulum, for example, the plot is filled with suspense, as the protagonists, fresh from reading occult conspiracy theories, playfully invent their own, before intermittently falling under the plot's spell and coming to the attention of sinister, shadowy forces. The plotting is careful and well designed, with an eye to attracting a mass audience, while the overlaying of discussions between the characters and the textual references to obscure conspiracy theories pushes readers to a recognition of their own need to judge the ideological reasons behind calculated falsehood (such as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Merrell also quotes another example of Eco's...