Umberto Eco

INTERVIEWER

In Foucault’s Pendulum you write, “The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.”

ECO

A secret is powerful when it is empty. People often mention the “Masonic secret.” What on earth is the Masonic secret? No one can tell. As long as it remains empty it can be filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.

INTERVIEWER

How hard do you work to get the voice just right?

ECO

I rewrite the same page dozens of times. Sometimes I like to read passages out loud. I am terribly sensitive to the tone of my writing.

INTERVIEWER

When in the day do you write?

ECO

There is no rule. For me it would be impossible to have a schedule. It can happen that I start writing at seven o’clock in the morning and I finish at three o’clock at night, stopping only to eat a sandwich. Sometimes I don’t feel the need to write at all.

INTERVIEWER

When you do write, how much do you write every day? Is there no rule for that as well?

ECO

None. Listen, writing doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

INTERVIEWER

So every day is different for you?

ECO

If I am in my countryside home, at the top of the hills of Montefeltro, then I have a certain routine. I turn on my computer, I look at my e-mails, I start reading something, and then I write until the afternoon. Later I go to the village, where I have a glass at the bar and read the newspaper. I come back home and I watch TV or a DVD in the evening until eleven, and then I work a little more until one or two o’clock in the morning. There I have a certain routine because I am not interrupted. When I am in Milan or at the university, I am not master of my own time—there is always somebody else deciding what I should do.

INTERVIEWER

What kinds of anxieties do you have when you sit down to write?

ECO

I have no anxieties.

INTERVIEWER

You have no anxieties. So you’re just very excited?

ECO

Before I sit down to write, I am deeply happy.

INTERVIEWER

What is the secret of such prolific production? You have written prodigious quantities of scholarly work, and your five novels are not exactly short.

ECO

I always say that I am able to use the interstices. There is a lot of space between atom and atom and electron and electron, and if we reduced the matter of the universe by eliminating all the space in between, the entire universe would be compressed into a ball. Our lives are full of interstices. This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever not work?

ECO

No, it doesn’t happen. Oh, well, yes, there was a period of two days when I had my surgery.

INTERVIEWER

With so many volumes, when you go to the bookshelf, how do you decide which book to pick up and read?

ECO

I don’t go to the bookshelves to choose a book to read. I go to the bookshelves to pick up a book I know I need in that moment.

INTERVIEWER

How important to you is the notion of your work surviving? Do you often think about your legacy?

ECO

I don’t believe one writes for oneself. I think that writing is an act of love—you write in order to give something to someone else. To communicate something. To have other people share your feelings.

INTERVIEWER

Is comedy a specifically human invention, as you said lying is?

ECO

Yes, since it seems that animals are bereft of humor. We know that they have a sense of play, they feel sorry, they weep, they suffer. We have proof that they are happy, when they are playing with us, but not that they have comic feelings. It is a typical human experience, which consists of—no, I can’t exactly say.

INTERVIEWER

Why not?

ECO

OK, fine. I have a suspicion that it is linked with the fact that we are the only animals who know we must die. The other animals don’t know it. They understand it only on the spot, in the moment that they die. They are unable to articulate anything like the statement: All men are mortal. We are able to do it, and that is probably why there are religions, rituals, and what have you. I think that comedy is the quintessential human reaction to the fear of death. If you ask me for something more, I cannot tell you. But perhaps I’ll create an empty secret now, and let everyone think that I have a theory of comedy in the works, so when I die they will spend a lot of time trying to retrieve my secret book.

In truth, what really happened with my desire to write a book on comedy was that I wrote The Name of the Rose instead. It was one of those cases in which, when you are unable to construct a theory, you narrate a story. And I believe that in The Name of the Rose, I did, in narrative form, flesh out a certain theory of the comic. The comic as a critical way of undercutting fanaticism. A diabolical shade of suspicion behind every proclamation of truth.

source
-Umberto Eco, The Paris Review The Art of Fiction No. 197
Interviewed by Lila Azam Zanganeh