Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco
Many stories that anticipate the future, when read after a space of time, perhaps when the future they had forecast has already arrived, are somewhat disappointing, since the events that have actually occurred, the real inventions, are infinitely more amazing than what the writer had once imagined. Not with Verne. No atomic submarine will ever be as technologically amazing as the Nautilus, and no airship or jumbo jet will ever have the fascination of Robur the Conqueror’s majestic propeller ship.
A third merit, for which author and publisher share equal credit, are the engravings that accompany the stories. We followers of Salgari fondly recall the marvelous illustrations by artists like Alberto Della Valle, Pipein Gamba, and Gennaro Amato, but they were paintings, and it was like seeing a Raphael in black and white. Verne’s engravings are far more mysterious and intriguing, and they make you want to examine them through a magnifying glass.
Captain Nemo, who sees the giant octopus from the large porthole of the Nautilus; Robur’s airship bristling with high-tech masts; the balloon that crashes down on the Mysterious Island (“Are we rising again?” “No. On the contrary.” “Are we descending?” “Worse than that, captain! We are falling!”); the enormous projectile that points toward the Moon; the caves at the center of the Earth—all are images that emerge from a dark background, outlines with thin black strokes alternating with whitish gashes, a universe without areas of uniform color, a vision scratched and scored, reflections that dazzle for lack of any strokes, a world seen by an animal with a retina all its own, as seen perhaps by oxen or dogs or lizards, a world glimpsed at night through the thin slats of a venetian blind, a territory always rather nocturnal and almost subaqueous, even in full daylight, made with the dots and abrasions that generate light only where the engraver’s tool has dug or left the surface in relief.
If you don’t have the money to buy Hetzel antiquarian editions, and you’re not convinced by the modern republished versions, go to http://jv.gilead.org.il/. Someone by the name of Zvi Har’El has collected all there is about Verne, with a complete bibliography, an anthology of essays, 488 incredible images of Jules Verne postage stamps from various countries, Hebrew translations (Mr. Har’El is Israeli, and fondly dedicates the site to his son, who died at the age of nineteen), but above all a “Virtual Library” where you’ll find Verne’s complete works in numerous languages, with all the engravings, at least from the original French editions, which you can save and enlarge as you wish, so that, though somewhat grainy, they become even more fascinating.
2005
Corkscrew space
Some might think it bad form for me to review a book for which I’ve written the preface. But while a review is expected to be objective and not tainted by personal interests, these fortnightly articles are by definition an expression of my personal interests, curiosity, and preferences. If I’ve written the preface for a book, it means I like it, and so I’m going to talk about it. The book is called Elementare, Wittgenstein! (Elementary, Dear Wittgenstein!) by Renato Giovannoli, which, despite its jaunty title, is both serious and demanding.
Giovannoli has also written one of the most fascinating “scientific” books, La scienza della fantascienza (The Science in Science Fiction), a thorough survey of the many fictional scientific ideas that circulate in mainstream science-fiction stories (the laws of robotics, the nature of aliens and mutants, hyperspace and the fourth dimension, time travel and temporal paradoxes, parallel universes, and so forth). These ideas display unexpected consistency, as though they constituted a system, equal in its uniformity and implications to that of science. This is no surprise: first, because science-fiction writers read each other’s books, and certain themes move from story to story, and various precepts have been created that run parallel to official science; second, because storytellers don’t develop their fictional tales in opposition to the solutions of science, but take science to its furthest conclusions; and finally, because some of the notions aired by science fiction, from Jules Verne onward, have later become scientific realities.
Giovannoli now applies the same criteria to the archipelago of crime literature, and suggests that the methods used by detectives in fictional narratives are similar to those of philosophers and scientists. The idea itself is not new, but the novelty here lies in the extent and rigor with which it is developed, so that we might wonder, in the end, what Giovannoli is doing—whether his book is a philosophy of detective fiction or whether it’s a philosophy manual that uses examples of reasoning found in detective fiction. As I’m not sure whether to recommend it to those wanting to understand crime fiction or those wanting to understand philosophy, I’ll play it safe and recommend it to both.
We can see, therefore, that not only do crime writers know about problems in philosophy and science (see the pages on the relationship between Dashiell Hammett, topology, and the theory of relativity), but also that certain thinkers may not have thought as they did if they hadn’t read detective stories. We can see what benefit Wittgenstein’s later ideas had gained from his reading hard-boiled novels.
I don’t know whether philosophy comes before the detective novel—after all, Oedipus Rex is the story of a crime investigation. But certainly, from the Gothic novel and Edgar Allan Poe onward, crime fiction has perhaps influenced academic thinkers more than we realize. Giovannoli demonstrates with logical formulas and diagrams that the evolution of the crime story from crime investigation to crime action is similar to the evolution from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to his Philosophical Investigations: the transition from a paradigm of deduction (which envisages an ordered world, a Great Chain of Being that can be explained in terms of almost fixed relationships between causes and effects and ruled by a sort of preestablished harmony for which the order and association of ideas in the detective’s mind reflect the order and associations governing reality) to a “pragmatist” paradigm in which the detective, rather than going back to the causes, provokes the effects.
The investigative crime story is certainly a small-scale model of metaphysical research, since both end up with the question “Who did this?,” which is the philosophical version of the whodunit. G. K. Chesterton described the detective story as a symbol of higher mysteries, and Gilles Deleuze maintained that a book on philosophy ought to be a kind of detective story. What are Saint Thomas Aquinas’s five ways to demonstrate the existence of God if not a model of investigation, following the tracks left by Someone? But there’s also an implicit philosophy in the hard-boiled novel. Look at Pascal and his wager: let’s try shuffling the cards, then see what happens. The stuff of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.
I’d like to mention the paragraphs that discuss the possible relationships between Agatha Christie and Heidegger. Giovannoli is not suggesting that And Then There Were None (1939) had influenced Being and Time (1927), even though Agatha Christie’s earlier use of time paradoxes could have inclined him in that direction. But I certainly think the suggestion that Christie’s writing contains an idea of “being-toward-death,” drawn from medieval sources, is a masterstroke. A final recommendation: read the pages on Hammett and corkscrew-shaped space.
2007
On unread books
I recall, though my recollection may be faulty, a magnificent article by Giorgio Manganelli explaining how a sophisticated reader can know whether a book is worth reading even before he opens it. He wasn’t referring to the capacity often required of a professional reader, or a keen and discerning reader, to judge from an opening line, from two pages glanced at random, from the index, or often from the bibliography, whether or not a book is worth reading. This, I say, is simply experience. No, Manganelli was talking about a kind of illumination, a gift that he was evidently and paradoxically claiming to have.
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard, a psychoanalyst and professor of literature, is not about how you might know not to read a book, but how you can happily talk about a book you haven’t read, even to your students, even
And critical context is Bayard’s crucial point. He declares without shame that he has never read James Joyce’s Ulysses, but that he can talk about it by alluding to the fact that it’s a retelling of the Odyssey (which he also admits never having read in its entirety), that it is based on an internal monologue, that the action unfolds in Dublin during a single day, etc. “As a result,” he writes, “I often find myself alluding to Joyce without the slightest anxiety.” Knowing a book’s relationship to other books often means you know more about it than you do on actually reading it.
Bayard shows how, when you read certain neglected books, you realize you’re familiar with their contents because they have been read by others who have talked about them, quoted from them, or have moved in the same current of ideas. He makes some extremely amusing observations on a number of literary texts that refer to books never read, including ones by Robert Musil, Graham Greene, Paul Valéry, Anatole France, and David Lodge. And he does me the honor of devoting a whole chapter to my The Name of the Rose, in which William of Baskerville demonstrates a familiarity with the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics while holding it in his hands for the first time. He does so for the simple reason that he infers what it says from some other pages of Aristotle. I’m not citing this passage out of mere vanity, though, as we shall see at the end of this article.
An intriguing aspect of this book, which is less paradoxical than it might seem, is that we also forget a large percentage of the books we have actually read, and indeed we build a sort of virtual picture of them which consists not so much of what they say, but what they have conjured up in our mind. So that if someone who hasn’t read a book then cites nonexistent passages or situations from it, we are ready to believe that they are in the book.
Bayard is not interested so much in people reading other people’s books as in the idea—and here is the voice of the psychoanalyst rather than the professor of literature—that every reading, or nonreading, or imperfect reading, must have a creative aspect, and that, to put it simply, readers have to do their own bit. And he looks forward to the prospect of a school where students “invent” books they don’t have to read, since talking about unread books is a means to self-awareness.
Except that Bayard demonstrates how, when someone talks about a book he or she hasn’t read, even those who have read it don’t realize what he or she has said about it is wrong. Toward the end of his book he admits he has introduced three false pieces of information in his summaries of The Name of the Rose, Graham Greene’s The Third Man, and David Lodge’s Changing Places. The amusing thing is that, when I read them, I immediately noticed the error regarding Graham Greene, was doubtful about David Lodge, but didn’t notice the error in my own book. This probably means that I didn’t read Bayard’s book properly, or alternatively, and both he and my readers would be entitled to suspect this, that I merely skimmed through it. But the most interesting thing is that Bayard has failed to notice that, in admitting his three intentional errors, he implicitly assumes that one way of reading is more correct than others, so that he carries out a meticulous study of the books he quotes in order to support his theory about not reading them. The contradiction is so apparent that it makes one wonder whether Bayard has actually read the book he’s written.
2007
On the obsolescence of digital media
Last Sunday, at a conference in Venice, there was a discussion about the transient nature of digital media. The Egyptian stele, the clay tablet, papyrus, parchment, and of course the printed book have all been media for information. The last of these, the book, has managed to survive well for five hundred years, though only when made with rag paper. From the mid-nineteenth century there was a move toward wood pulp paper, which seems to have a maximum life of seventy years—try handling newspapers or books produced shortly after World War II and you’ll discover how many of them disintegrate as soon as you turn the page. For some time, therefore, conferences and researchers have been looking for ways to save the books that cram our libraries. One of the most popular ways, though it’s almost impossible for every book in existence, is to scan and transfer each page onto electronic media.
But this raises another problem. Every medium used for transferring and conserving information, whether the film reel, the disk, or the USB memory stick we use with our computers, is less durable than the book. We know about some of these: the old audiocassette tapes would unravel after a while and we’d try rewinding them, often unsuccessfully, by sticking a pencil in the hole; videocassettes easily lost their color and definition, and soon got damaged if they were wound back and forth. We had long enough to find out how well a vinyl record would fare before it became scratched, though we didn’t have time to find out how long a CD would last. Having been welcomed as an invention that would replace the book, the CD disappeared as soon as the same content became available more cheaply online. We don’t know how long a film will last on DVD; we know only that it sometimes starts skipping when we use it too many times. Likewise, we didn’t have enough time to discover how long floppy disks would last: before we could find out, they were replaced by rigid diskettes, and then by rewritable disks, and then by USB memory sticks. The disappearance of these media has led to the disappearance of the computers that can read them. I don’t suppose anyone has a computer at home with a slot for a floppy disk, and unless all files on the previous support have been transferred to the later support, and this every two or three years, presumably forever, then the information is irretrievably lost, unless we keep a dozen or so computers in the attic, one for each obsolete file-storage method.
This means that all mechanical, electrical, and electronic media have either been shown to deteriorate rapidly, or we don’t know and will probably never know how long they would have lasted.
Finally, it only requires a power surge, lightning, or some other trivial incident to demagnetize a memory card. During a fairly prolonged blackout I would be prevented from using any electronic memory. Though I have all of Don Quixote in my electronic memory, I would not be able to read it by candlelight, in a hammock, on a boat, in the bath, or on a swing, whereas I can read a book in the most adverse conditions. If I drop my computer or e-book from the fifth floor, I would certainly lose everything, but if I drop a book, at worst it would fall apart.
Modern media seem to be aimed more at the broadcasting of information than its conservation. Yet the book was a prime instrument not just for broadcasting information—think of the role played by the printed Bible in the Protestant Reformation—but also for conserving it. It’s just possible that in a few centuries’ time, once all electronic media have become demagnetized, a fine incunabulum will be the only way of finding out about the past. And the modern books that survive will be those that are printed on the best quality acid-free paper.
I’m no traditionalist. On a 250-gigabyte portable hard disk I’ve recorded the greatest masterpieces of world literature and the history of philosophy; there it’s much easier and quicker to find a quote from Dante or the Summa Theologiae than to go to a top shelf and take down a heavy volume. But I’m happy those books are still there on my shelves, useful backups for the time when electronic instruments eventually pack up.
2009
Festschrift
In academic jargon a Festschrift is a volume of learned contributions prepared by friends and students to
In practical terms it’s easy to imagine how an essay written for a Festschrift gets lost, especially in the latter case, since no one will know that you’ve written on the specific topic in a publication of that kind. In any event, it’s a sacrifice that contributors may willingly make, perhaps hoping they can recycle what they’ve written elsewhere. Except that the Festschrift used to be presented when the subject reached sixty, a reasonably good age, and if all went well he’d die before seventy. Today, thanks to medical advances, the subject is in danger of living to ninety, and his students will have to write a Festschrift for him when he reaches sixty, seventy, eighty, and ninety.
Moreover, since international links have been strengthened over the past half century and each academic has many more close colleagues than used to be the case, the average academic receives at least twenty or thirty requests a year for volumes celebrating colleagues throughout the world who have happily reached ages of biblical proportions. If we bear in mind that a paper written for a Festschrift, if it’s not to look too mean, must be at least twenty pages long, each academic would be writing an average of six hundred pages a year, every page ideally original, to celebrate those long-lived and much-loved friends. The demands are clearly impossible, yet a refusal might be mistaken for lack of respect.