Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco
Harry Potter is the son of two good and kind magicians murdered by the forces of evil, although at first he didn’t know this. He has been brought up as an orphan in the house of a mean and tyrannical uncle and aunt, then discovers his true nature and vocation, and is sent to a school for young wizards and witches, where he has remarkable adventures. And here is the first classic plot structure: take a young and tender child, subject him to all manner of suffering, let him discover his noble background, his great destiny, and here you have not just the Ugly Duckling and Cinderella, but also Oliver Twist, and Rémi in Hector Malot’s novel Sans Famille. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where Harry learns to make magic potions, mirrors British boarding schools where pupils play one of those Anglo-Saxon sports that fascinate readers on that side of the Channel because they can guess the rules, and fascinate continental readers because they can’t. But another archetypal situation is that of Ferenc Molnár’s novel The Paul Street Boys. There’s also something of Vamba’s novel Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca, with schoolchildren who join forces against eccentric, even wicked, teachers. What’s more, the pupils play games on flying broomsticks, and here we also see Mary Poppins and Peter Pan. Finally, Hogwarts looks like one of those mysterious castles we read about in children’s books where a group of boys in short trousers and girls with long golden hair manage to unmask the dealings of a dishonest official, a corrupt uncle, or a band of villains, and discover in the end a treasure, a lost document, a chamber of secrets.
While in Harry Potter books there are fearsome spells and gruesome animals (their stories aimed at youngsters brought up on cinema monsters and Japanese cartoons), those children nevertheless fight for good causes like so many Boy Scouts, and listen to virtuous teachers, producing much the same feel-good effect as Edmondo De Amicis’s incomparable nineteenth-century children’s classic, Heart.
Do we really imagine that children who read stories about magic will turn into adults who believe in witches, which was what our chat-show wizard and exorcist both thought, though from opposing poles? We all used to have a healthy fear of ogres and werewolves, but once we grew up we learned to fear the hole in the ozone layer rather than the poisoned apple. And when we were children we believed that babies were delivered by storks, but this hasn’t prevented us, as adults, from finding a more convenient and agreeable way of producing them.
The real problem is not children brought up believing in Pinocchio’s Fox and Cat who then have to learn about other, less fanciful villains. More worrying are those adults, perhaps the ones who didn’t read stories of magic when they were children, who are persuaded by TV channels to visit readers of tea leaves or tarot cards, or attend black masses, or seek out crystal gazers, healers, table tilters, fake conjurers of ectoplasm, revealers of the mystery of Tutankhamen. And then, by believing in magicians, they trust even the Fox and the Cat.
2001
How to protect yourself from the Templars
I’ve just received two books about the Knights Templar. The first is a fat volume of three hundred pages, the other a mere sixty pages, neither of which is complete mumbo jumbo. This would be a strange way of introducing a biography of Julius Caesar or a history of the Pilgrim Fathers, but with the Knights Templar you have to be careful from the very start.
If you’re a publisher who wants to make some money, get a hack writer to produce a book on the Templars. The more historically improbable the facts you put together, the more mystery-starved readers you’ll find to buy it. But if you want to know whether a particular book on the Templars is to be trusted, look at the contents page. If it starts with the First Crusade and ends with the burning of the Templars at the stake in 1314, with no more than an appendix recounting later legends with a certain degree of skepticism, then the book is probably serious. If it confidently arrives at the Knights Templar of today, then it’s a canard.
Unless, that is, the writer wants to give a historical account of how the myth began and was developed. The best documented work on this subject is still La Franc-Maçonnerie templière et occultiste au XVIIIe et XIXe siècle by René Le Forestier. Those who wish to follow the development of the myth in the tangled forest of contemporary occultism, among gnostic sects, satanic fraternities, spiritualists, Pythagorean and Rosicrucian orders, Illuminati, Freemasons, and UFO hunters, can read Massimo Introvigne’s Il cappello del mago (The Magician’s Hat). But if you want a good historical, balanced, and reliable summary, from the trial up to modern times, search out Franco Cardini’s I segreti del tempio: Esoterismo e Templari, a supplement to Storia e Dossier. In any event, for the true history of the “real” Knights Templar, you’ll also find it useful to read Philippe le Bel by Jean Favier, Vie et mort de l’ordre du Temple, 1120–1314 by Alain Demurger, and The Knights Templar and Their Myth by Peter Partner.
Why have the Knights Templar inspired so many legends? Because their history is the stuff of serial fiction. Create an order of monastic knights, get them to carry out extraordinary warlike feats, make them vastly wealthy, find a king who wants to get rid of what has become a state within a state and who finds inquisitors ready to gather rumors here and there, some true and some false, and fit them into a terrible mosaic of conspiracy, foul crimes, unspeakable heresies, witchcraft, and a good dose of homosexuality. Then arrest and torture the suspects, let them know that the life of anyone who confesses will be spared, while those who declare their innocence will be burned at the stake. The victims themselves will be the first to justify your inquisitorial construction, and the legend that follows it.
The history of the order ends tragically at that point, and marks the beginning of other political and ideological trials that would follow, up to the present day. But after such brutal repression, inevitable questions arise: What happened to the Knights Templar who escaped execution? Did they end their days in some monastery trying to forget the whole terrible business? Or, being distrustful like all turncoats, did they reestablish themselves in a secret society that became more and more secretive and ramified through the centuries? The second hypothesis has no historical support, but can prompt endless games of historical fantasy.
On the Internet you’ll find many modern orders of Knights Templar still active. There’s no law to stop anyone appropriating a legend. Anyone can call themselves high priest of Isis and Osiris—after all, there are no longer any pharaohs to challenge them. So if you want historical fantasy, go to the sensationalist pseudo-historiography of Louis Charpentier’s The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, or Dante by Robert L. John, which claims that Dante was a Knight Templar, and where you’ll find such examples of argumentative style as: “Beatrice’s ‘limbs scattered in earth’ . . . are (we repeat) the numerous limbs, scattered throughout Italy, of the spiritual Knights Templar associations that the Most Noble Lady indicates with that plainly gnostic name.”
But if this is what you’re looking for, go straight to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln for the most brazen example of historical fantasy. Their fanciful dishonesty is so evident that inoculated readers can amuse themselves in a game of bluff.
2001
The whiff of books
I’ve spoken twice in recent weeks about book collecting, and the audience on both occasions included many young people. It’s difficult to talk about a personal passion for books. Once, in a radio interview, I said it’s rather like being a pervert who makes love with goats. If you say you’ve spent a night with Naomi Campbell or with the beautiful girl next door, they follow you with interest, envy, or roguish delight. If you talk about the pleasurable experience of having intercourse with a goat, people become embarrassed and try to change the subject. Anyone visiting the home of a person who collects Renaissance paintings or Chinese porcelain is thrilled by such wonders. If he shows them a seventeenth-century book in duodecimo with reddened pages and says that you can count those who own a copy on the fingers of one hand, the visitor will look anxiously for an excu
A bibliophile loves books, but not necessarily their contents. If you’re interested in content, you can go to a library, whereas the bibliophile, though aware of the content, wants the object, and ideally he wants it to be the first off the printer’s press. To such an extent that there are some bibliophiles—I don’t agree, but I understand them—who won’t cut the pages when they find an uncut book, so as not to violate it. Cutting the pages of a rare book would for them be like a collector of watches breaking open the case to look at the mechanism.
A bibliophile doesn’t love The Divine Comedy; he loves a particular edition and a particular copy of The Divine Comedy. He wants to touch it, turn its pages, run his hands over the binding. In this sense he “converses” with the book as an object, for what the book has to say about its origins, its history, the countless hands through which it has passed. At times the book recounts its history through thumbprints, marginal notes, underlinings, an autograph on the front page, even wormholes. And it has an ever finer history to tell when, after five hundred years, its virgin white pages still crackle between the fingers.
A book as object can tell a good story even when it’s been around for only fifty years. I have a copy of La philosophie au Moyen ge by Étienne Gilson, published in the 1950s, which I’ve owned since the days of my university thesis. The paper at that time was of poor quality, and the book now falls apart each time I turn the pages. If it were simply a tool of my profession, I’d have no option but to look for a new edition, which can be found cheaply. But I want that copy, with its fragile antiquity, with its underlinings and notes in various colors marking the times I’ve reread it. Holding it reminds me of my years as a student and beyond, and therefore forms part of my memory.
Young people need to know this, since book collecting is generally considered a passion only for the rich. There are of course old books that cost millions (a first edition incunabulum of The Divine Comedy recently fetched 1.5 million euros), but those who love books are interested not just in antique tomes but in more recent books, which might be a first edition volume of modern poetry. Some readers collect complete sets of children’s books. Three years ago I found a first edition of Giovanni Papini’s 1931 satirical novel Gog, rebound but with its original cover, for 10 euros. It’s true that ten years ago I saw a 1914 first edition of Dino Campana’s Canti orfici in a catalog for 13 million lire (the equivalent of 6,500 euros)—evidently the poor man could afford to print only a few copies—but it’s possible to build an impressive collection of twentieth-century literature for no more than a few meals at a restaurant. One of my students used to prowl the bookstalls collecting nothing but tourist guides from different periods. At first I thought it a bizarre idea, but using those booklets of faded photographs, he produced a magnificent thesis showing how the look of a particular city could change over the years. There again, a cash-strapped youngster can still browse the bookstalls of a city like Milan and find sixteenth- and seventeenth-century 16mo editions for the price of a good pair of sneakers, and, though not rare, they can still give something of the flavor of the time.
Book collecting is like stamp collecting. The great collector has items worth a fortune, but as a child I bought assorted packs of ten or twenty stamps from the newsstand and spent many evenings dreaming about Madagascar or the islands of Fiji, gazing at multicolored rectangles that were wonderful, though not rare. Ah, what nostalgia.
2004
Here’s the right angle
It’s generally believed that things are known by the way they are defined. In certain cases this is true, as with chemical formulas. Knowing that something is NaCl helps anyone who understands chemistry to see that it is composed of chlorine and sodium, and to conclude, even though the definition doesn’t expressly say so, that it is salt. But the chemical definition doesn’t tell us all we need to know about salt: that it is used for preserving and flavoring food, that it increases blood pressure, that it is extracted from the sea or from salt mines, and that it was more expensive and precious in ancient times than it is today. To discover all we know about salt, or all we need to know (leaving aside other details), we have to listen not so much to definitions, but to stories. Stories that, for those who really want to know everything about salt, also become marvelous tales of adventure, with caravans trailing along the salt road through the desert between the Mali Empire and the sea, or stories of the first doctors who bathed wounds in salt solution. In other words, our knowledge of science is just as interwoven with stories as any other knowledge.
A child has two ways of getting to know the world. One is called ostensive learning. He asks his mother what a dog is, and she points to a dachshund. The amazing thing is that the next day he can identify a greyhound as a dog, perhaps later going too far and including the first sheep he sees as a dog, though it is unlikely he’ll fail to recognize another dog as a dog. The second way is not by definitions such as “the dog is a placental, carnivorous, fissiped, canine mammal,” which, though taxonomically correct, means nothing to a child, but by some form of story: “You remember the day we went into Grandma’s garden and there was an animal with . . .”
Children in fact don’t ask what a dog or a tree is. They generally see them and somebody then explains what they are called. And that’s when the question “Why?” emerges. It’s not so difficult to understand that a beech and an oak are both trees, but the real curiosity arises with these questions: Why are they there? Where do they come from? How do they grow? What are they for? Why do they lose their leaves? This is where stories come in. Knowledge is spread through stories: a seed is planted, it germinates, and so on.
And the real “thing” that children want to know, namely, where babies come from, can only be told in the form of a story, whether it’s about the birds and the bees, or about Daddy who gives a seed to Mommy.
I’m among those who believe that scientific knowledge should take the form of stories, and I always refer my students to a fine passage by Charles Sanders Peirce. In defining lithium, he describes in twenty lines the process for its extraction in the laboratory, which I think of as a purely poetic description. One day I witnessed this wonderful process and felt as if I were in an alchemist’s lair, and yet it was true chemistry.
At a conference on Aristotle, my friend Franco Lo Piparo pointed out that Euclid, the father of geometry, doesn’t define a right angle as an angle of ninety degrees. If we think about it, that definition is correct, but of course it’s useless for anyone who doesn’t know what an angle is, or doesn’t know what degrees are, and I hope that no parents will ever undermine their children by telling them that angles are right angles if they are at ninety degrees.
This is how Euclid explains it: “When a straight line standing on a straight line makes the adjacent angles equal to one another, each of the equal angles is right, and the straight line standing on the other is called a perpendicular to that on which it stands.”
Got it? You want to know what a right angle is? I’ll tell you how to make one, or rather, I’ll tell you the story of what steps you take to arrive at it. Then you’ll understand. Besides, you can learn what steps to take later, after you’ve constructed that marvelous intersection between two straight lines.
To me this seems both instructive and highly poetic. It brings us closer to the universe of imagination, where to create stories we imagine worlds, and to the universe of reality, where to understand the world we create stories.
Why have I told you all this? Because in my very first column, back in 1985, I told you I’d be talking about everything that came into my head, and this is what came into my head today.
2005
Journey to the center of Jules Verne
As children, we divided into two groups: supporters of Emilio Salgari and those who supported Jules Verne. I admit that I supported Salgari, and history makes it imperative for me to reassess the opinions I once held. It seems that Salgari, though an author who is still read, quoted from memory,
Now, in 2005, we are celebrating the centenary of the death of Jules Verne, and newspapers, magazines, and conferences, not just in France, are reappraising him, demonstrating how often his imaginings anticipated reality. A glance at publishers’ catalogs in Italy suggests that Verne is republished more frequently than Salgari, which is also the case in France, where there is an antiquarian book trade devoted to him, due no doubt to the old Hetzel bindings of Verne that are of great beauty. In Paris, there are two shops on the Right Bank alone devoted to these splendid volumes bound in red and gold, which fetch prohibitive prices.
Whatever merit we must concede to Salgari, the creator of the pirate Sandokan didn’t have a great sense of humor, nor did his characters, with the exception of Yanez, whereas Verne’s stories are full of humor. Suffice it to recall the splendid pages of Michael Strogoff; or, The Courier of the Czar, where, after the battle of Kolyvan, the Daily Telegraph correspondent Harry Blount, to prevent his rival Alcide Jolivet from sending his dispatch to Paris, keeps the telegraph office busy by dictating verses of the Bible at a cost of several thousand rubles, until Jolivet manages to steal his position at the telegraph counter, transmitting songs by Pierre-Jean de Béranger. Verne’s story continues: “ ‘Hallo!’ said Harry Blount. ‘Just so,’ answered Alcide Jolivet.” Tell me this isn’t style.