Umberto Eco: Texts, sign systems and the risks of over-interpretation
Paul Cobley discusses how Eco advanced semiotics and championed the sophistication of popular culture
Umberto Eco died in 2016, and as the obituaries made clear, his death marked the passing of a hugely influential polymath. Yet few of the newspaper obituarists seemed to know quite what he had done. He had been involved in something that had changed the way texts are interpreted; but it was not really clear why that was so Earth-shattering. Much of what he achieved was a result of “the esoteric theory of semiotics” (the Scotsman): an “arcane field” (the New York Times) or “abstruse branch of literary theory” (the Guardian and the Telegraph), which the Washington Post hardly elucidated: “the study of signs, symbols and hidden messages”. Eco had been the author of a number of high-profile novels, some of which make for challenging reading. He was also a medievalist, a most otherworldly pursuit in the contemporary environment. On the other hand, he was a champion of the popular, an academic and journalistic writer on media and communications since the 1960s.
Born in 1932 in Piedmont, the son of an accountant and an office worker in an iron works, Eco was steeped in popular culture from an early age, flipping through magazines at home and going to the cinema to watch movies. Although he became an atheist in his twenties, he received a strongly Catholic education and entered the University of Turin where he studied medieval philosophy and literature. He wrote his thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, publishing a version of it as a book in 1956; he followed that in 1959 with a book on medieval aesthetics. At this time, he was working for the Italian state broadcaster RAI, as a “cultural editor”, leaving in the early 1960s to work as an editor for the publishing house Bompiani in Milan. Eco also joined a number of avant-garde artists as a founding member of Group 63 (named after the year in which they first assembled). Two of his books, in particular, are associated with this work: Opera aperta (1962) which seems to have grown out of his acute interest in James Joyce and which laid out a theory of the “open” and “closed” text; and La Struttura assente (1968), the latter being one of a small number of Eco’s books which have not been translated in their entirety into English. La Struttura assente is a milestone because it contains some of Eco’s first essays on media as well as evincing a semiotic perspective. Yet a small book published in 1964 exemplifies the kind of strategy with which Eco perplexed mainstream critics, even in 2016. Apocalittici e integrati (partly translated into English in the 1994 volume Apocalypse Postponed) features analyses of popular texts, including the Peanuts and Superman comic strips, mainly from the perspective of Aristotle’s Poetics. With a great deal of humour and self-consciousness which second-guesses his critics, and without a tortuous theoretical framework, Eco shows how Peanuts enacts the reduction of adult myths to childhood myths. Peanuts does this in such a way as to appeal to different readers: both the innocent and the sophisticated. The children’s articulation of adult neuroses, while monstrous, can “sift out the detritus, and give us back a world that is still and always very sweet and soft, tasting of milk and cleanliness”. In this way, Peanuts pulls off the rare trick, Eco argues, of appealing both to jaded adults and not yet disillusioned children. In other words, its text is characterized by different levels of narrative and allusion and these levels are discerned by differently disposed readers.
A contemporary reviewer of the Superman essay chided Eco for the apparent bathos of discussing popular entertainment with reference to canonical philosophy: “Eco cites Husserl, Kant and Baltrušaitis for no good reason, almost as if he wished to be forgiven for the humbleness of his own theme”. Of course, this was to miss the point. Eco insisted that “the comic strip is an industrial product” but, for all that, is not to be mistaken for a shoddily constructed throwaway commodity. The Italian translators of Peanuts lavished upon it “the meticulous passion that Max Brod devoted to the manuscripts of Kafka, Valery Larbaud to the French version of Ulysses, and Father Van Breda to the shorthand notes of Edmund Husserl”. For Eco, if Peanuts or any other multi-levelled artefact of popular culture is to be analysed, then it demands the same degree of care, time and sophistication as that with which it was produced. Eco unapologetically called Peanuts’s creator, Charles M. Schulz, a “poet”.
As well as making for good copy, this kind of juxtaposition became part of Eco’s commitment to semiotics, especially after his co-founding of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Paris during 1969. Alongside his media work and appointment as Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna in 1975, he continued to publish landmark books in sign theory, including A Theory of Semiotics (1976), Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984) and an English edition of his works on the semiotics of texts entitled The Role of the Reader (1979). In the midst of this, Eco became an internationally celebrated novelist with his bestseller, Il nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose, 1983). Featuring a series of murders in an Italian monastery, a struggle over Aristotle’s legacy and a sign-obsessed Franciscan detective, William of Baskerville, it seemed to many that Eco’s alchemy had led to the philosopher’s stone: popular culture as a vehicle for literary theory. Thereafter, Eco became best known for his novels, most of which, before his final thriller Numero Zero (2015), were less suited to the beach or the long-haul flight than his debut. As an academic, Eco enjoyed numerous high-profile international visiting posts and continued to be in demand from the media up to his death.
It is difficult to pin Eco down. In addition to semiotics and the content of popular culture, his work bears on the organization and dissemination of meaning through media, the history and theory of language, fiction in general, medieval science and invention, experimental literature, medieval philosophy, aesthetics, translation and how to write a thesis. He also wrote fiction for children. There is, therefore, more than one Umberto Eco. Yet the idea of interpretation runs through all his work. His writings seem to ask repeatedly for the reasons why knowledge is concealed or shrouded in illusion or masked by the mechanisms of memory. They also seek to unravel the processes of interpretation. Certainly, these themes loom large in the novels: the repressing of Book II of Poetics in The Name of the Rose; the creation of “The Plan” in Foucault’s Pendulum; Simonini in The Prague Cemetery who creates conspiracy fictions in the nineteenth century, building up to his “masterpiece” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and the competing claims of the truth-seeking newspaper Domani and the various obfuscating scandal sheets in Numero Zero.
One of Eco’s most famous statements on the subject of his theoretical work, which he offered in the early pages of A Theory of Semiotics, is that “semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie”. This accounts for the issue of fabrication in signs and communication. Yet, semiotics, as Eco formulated it in his broader work, is a matter of approaching meaning not as a spontaneous phenomenon which comes from nowhere, but as the product of sign systems which need to be interrogated, broken down and understood. One of the key concepts of semiotics, invented concurrently by Roland Barthes and Juri Lotman in the early 1960s, is “the text”. Whereas a “work” indicates some higher purpose of an authorial genius, “the text” suggests the devices and mechanisms which arise through the use of signs, irrespective of an author, to reach a particular audience. Any collection of signs is a text, from Boccaccio’s Decameron to a news photo in La Stampa, from the character of James Bond to internet porn, and, for more recent semiotics, from the distress call of an animal to the immune response in a cell. If all manifestations of signs can be treated as belonging to broadly similar systems, then the line dividing so-called “high” and popular culture is not only imaginary but also itself a kind of sign system.
Perhaps what characterizes signs is their plenitude and their interpretability. Signs, always apprehended as an array (semiosis), have many potential meanings and cry out for interpretation. The bathetic effect of heavy theory being applied to popular texts is surely a product of the idea that popular culture is ephemeral and insignificant (literally, in the sense of signifying nothing). Yet, even though semiotics has been part of public discourse in the West for quite a few decades, it is still sometimes presented as an inversion of priorities by critics who hold on to the old certainties of “high” literature or “high” art. Personally, Eco revelled in such inversions: one of his essays on media from the 1970s, for example, is called “Does the public harm television?” (1974); another, from 2001, asks the question “Is Harry Potter bad for adults?” Both essays, many years apart, show that what is taken to be the “message”, is actually a “text” made up of numerous differing, but related, messages, some of them archetypal and some of them seemingly new. It follows that the “text” can appeal to different kinds of readers at different levels. “In order to know what part of a message has got through”, Eco writes, “one must first know how many different messages were encapsulated in that text.” Although the contention that a “subtext” might exist or that reading texts in a fashion other than the way formal schooling has inculcated are both now commonplace, Eco inaugurated theoretical discussion of such ideas and continued to push for them. Throughout his career, he sought to investigate signs’ interpretability; indeed, by the early 1990s, Eco felt compelled to step in and point out what amounts to overinterpretation as well as how reasonable interpretation works.
The impetus for this project goes all the way back to his Opera aperta. Even though this is a pre-semiotic work by Eco, the main theory is that there are texts which are effectively to be interpreted as closed at their conclusion, with the narrative largely wrapped up and little or no further need for interpretation by the reader; and texts that are left open, where the reader is left to ponder the multiple meanings of what the narrative has presented, interpreting not only components that have been narrated (story, setting, character) but also those, such as the future fate of the protagonists, that have not. A work of detective fiction will tend to be open at most points in the unfolding of the narrative, with clues left to be interpreted by the reader, before proceeding to closure at the end. A piece of deliberately literary fiction will tend to tie up the interpretation of most points in the course of the narrative but leave the points at the end open for interpretation. It was a perspective to which Eco returned in the essays that made up the English publication of The Role of the Reader. In common with much of the contemporary work on the reading process, Eco tended to elide the difference between the terms “reader” and a “reading” of a text. Famously, the American literary theorist Wayne Booth cemented such an elision in 1961, through the idea of the “implied reader”, the hypothetical addressee of any text that will be largely accepting of that text’s premisses and will produce a “reading” along those lines. Eco, partly concurring, supplemented Booth’s “implied reader” by theorizing that there were a number of different kinds of “readers” who might interact with a given text. An Empirical Reader would be the real person, in the real world, perceiving the text; the Implied Reader would be the reading that the narrator, for example, might try to influence a reader to make; the Model Reader would be a reading which negotiated adeptly all the components offered for interpretation.
This theory of reading became dominant in the study of media from the 1970s onwards. In 1972, Eco was invited to give a presentation on the nature of the television message at the seminar of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, run by Stuart Hall at Birmingham University. At that time (and subsequently in A Theory of Semiotics), Eco’s work had been influenced by post-war information, communication and media theory. In information theory, especially, concerned with the transfer of packets of information from one location to another (for example, down a telephone line) solely in terms of engineering, the concept of “code” was paramount. The code in information theory is a configuration of elements – letters, numbers, figures – which will generate, without deviation, a specific message, in much the same way as computer code will carry out a function and generate a manifest process on the computer screen. Eco’s work from this period is coloured by the possibility of identifying “codes” of reading and codes in texts analogous to those identified in engineering. Although he stressed the difference between strong and weak codes, a distinction taken up by Hall and his colleagues in the encoding/decoding model for analysing media, Eco’s work nevertheless created the impression that, like magic, semiotics could unlock “true” meanings. Looking back, in an interview conducted towards the end of his life, Eco lamented that he and colleagues during the period had been incontinent about the concept, overstressing its possibilities; or, as he put it: “we pissed code”.
Yet, in time, semiotics was found guilty of a double disappointment. On the one hand, by the dawn of the 1980s it had become very fashionable in its promise to deliver a key to signification, an answer to how meaning was coded. On the other hand, it had let the genie out of the bottle: it seemingly allowed as many interpretations as there were people to carry them out. In this last respect, Eco was particularly concerned that followers of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction and poststructuralism had wittingly or unwittingly encouraged a culture of “anything goes”. In 1990, Eco wrote, “I was studying the dialectics between the rights of texts and the rights of their interpreters. I have the impression that, in the course of the last decades, the rights of the interpreters have been overstressed”. Ultimately, Eco was at pains to show that semiotics entailed neither the certainties of code nor the unfettered freedom of arbitrary interpretation. Citing the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, the nineteenth-century pragmatist philosopher he had championed for decades, Eco insisted that texts invite warranted interpretations that are based on what the reasoning of the community finds acceptable and what might have practical or workable parameters in the circumstances – and that interpretation is not the result of individual caprice or perversity.
The implications to be taken from Eco’s investigations into interpretation are not just a matter of reading texts in a warranted or unwarranted fashion. What is more important for Eco, as he explores in a number of later works, is how texts record in an “encyclopedia” the artefacts of culture. In one of his last theoretical books, From the Tree to the Labyrinth (translated into English in 2014), Eco discusses such an encyclopedia via which wisdom (as opposed to accumulation of facts) is to be remembered. What Eco terms the Vertigo of the Labyrinth, the sheer number of texts that make up the encyclopedia, along with the labour that goes into producing workable interpretations of them, is “often the price we must pay for calling into question the laziest of our ontologies”. Cultures survive with a manageable number of texts that make up their memories; but that stock is always a pared down version of the real, unmanageable sum.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Eco worried about the excessive paring down of the encyclopedia and the decline of interpretative principles. In a letter to his grandson, published in L’Espresso (2014), Eco warns that humans’ reliance on internet-connected devices is causing memory loss; he advises his grandson to start memorizing things for himself from the arts and culture so that he will be fulfilled, as if he had “lived a thousand lives” instead of living one that is “monotonous and devoid of great emotion”. Rather than retrieving facts, humans also need to interpret. “Everyone is capable of storing new information”, he writes, “so long as they have a good memory. But deciding what is worth remembering, and what is not, is a subtle art.”
Perhaps there are some answers here about why it was so difficult for obituarists to say what Eco did. Some derided his novels for being too difficult while deploring his democratization of the process of interpretation. Semiotics did not require the entry fee of breeding: once learned, it could be implemented by anyone – but with the proviso that one needed to analyse one’s own position in the reading process and consider the grounds on which interpretation was made. For those mourning the unquestioned authority that came with standing on the privileged side of the high–low divide, semiotics was a bitter pill to swallow.
Paul Cobley is Professor in Language and Media at Middlesex University and President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies.
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