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Chaosmos: The Return of the Middle Ages
- Fordham University Press
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UInberto Eco ChaoJmoJ: The Return ofthe Middle AgeJ RK: You have argued that the Dark Ages is a much maligned period of European history. Why? DE: We can speak of the Dark Ages in the sense that the population of Europe fell by twenty million. The situation was really horrible . The only flourishing civilization was the Irish one, and that's not by chance. Those Irish monks went to civilize the continent. But immediately after the millennium, we cannot speak any longer of Dark Ages. You know that, about the tenth century, they discovered a new cultivation of beans, all those vegetable proteins. One historian called the tenth century "the century full of beans"; it was an enormous revolution . Now, the whole of Europe started to be fed with vegetable proteins . A real, biological change. And the centuries immediately after the millennium were called the First Industrial Revolution, because in those three centuries, more or less before the Renaissance, there was a larger-scale application of the windmills and the invention of the new collar for horses and for cattle. With the old collar, they were practically strangled. With the new one, on the chest, the force of the animal was four, five, or six times greater. Then there was the invention of the posterior rudder. Until that time, ships had a lateral rudder and it was very difficult to move against the wind. With a back-moving rudder, the possibilities for shipping became enormous; the discovery of America by Columbus wouldn't have been possible without this 223 technological innovation. And we can list many other miracles of discovery . So, it means that European culture, European society, grew with the new feudalism and the new bourgeoisie, the birth of Italian and Flemish communes, the free cities, the invention of the bank, the invention of the check, of credit. RK: In one ofyour essays, you actually talk about the return of the Middle Ages. Do you believe that there is some sort of cycle to history, and that we are now reliving some of the traumas of the Middle Ages? DE: Well, in that essay I wanted to stress certain common elements in the sense in which our era is undoubtedly an era of transition, in a very accelerated way. It's enough to think ofwhat happened in the last few years in Europe to understand the sense in which we are living in a new era of revolution. This is, as the Middle Ages was, an era of transition in which new forms, new social, technological, philosophical forms are invented. And at the time I wrote the essay I was also impressed by certain common patterns in the rise of terrorism: I saw the rise ofgroups like the Red Brigade and PLO, etc., as a return of medieval millenarianism , informed by a sense of apocalypse and breakdown. The Atomic Age as a sort of reliving of the Middle Ages. RK: If I could take an example from literature now,........,Joyce, somebody you have written much about, including your book, Jamed Joyce and the Middle Aged. You seem to argue that Joyce represents a balance between a fidelity to the cosmic order of the Middle Ages (represented in particular by his fascination for Thomist aesthetics), and an avantgarde pioneering quality which you equate with the contingency and experimentation ofmodernity. Is there not a sense in which for you Joyce is an exemplar who combines a medieval aesthetic with a modern one? DE: I think that Joyce is a paramount case of contrast and fusion, an incredible cocktail between those two aspects. They are present in his life in a Catholic milieu, the reading of St. Thomas Aquinas, a deep understanding of it, and his interest in experimental literature, and this sort of destruction oflanguage that he called in Finnegand Wake the IIabnihilation of the ethym." Joyce's work, as well as his life, was an oscillation , or dialectic, between opposites. Take ULydd&1. In ULydd&1J he destroys all the existing forms of narrative, destroys all the existing forms oflanguage . In doing that, he has built from the structure of the Odyssey, but it could have been something else; it was this medieval idea of the cathedral -like structure, and without this structure he would have been unable to undertake his work of disruption, destruction, decomposition. I think 224 • Umberto Eco [44.192.247.185] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:15 GMT) that this dialectic is present in every author, but in Joyce it was...