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Umberto Eco, 90 years after his birth

2022-01-05T17:19:33.387Z


From semiologist to star novelist. He wrote neo-avant-garde open work and The Name of the Rose. His death on 19 February 2016 at the age of 84 © ANSA


 January 5 of this year marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of Umberto Eco, internationally renowned critic, essayist, writer and semiologist.

He was born in Alexandria on January 5, 1932. He passed away on the evening of February 19, 2016 at the age of 84. 

In 1962 he published Open Opera, analysis of literary texts in structuralist terms starting with Joyce's Ulysses, which led to discussions and became one of the manifestos of the neo-avant-garde reunited the following year in the '63 Group. In 1980 the medieval historical novel Il nome della rosa was released, which aroused international acclaim, a best seller with over 12 million copies. Umberto Eco's work takes place between these two stages, less distant and different than it may appear. 

As an ironic observer and semiologist who is warned as well as creative, in fact, he has shown on every occasion that he knows how to grasp the spirit of the time. His Lector in fabula, an essay from 1979 (not surprisingly the period in which he was writing The Name of the Rose), is the reader who in a text, particularly if creative, literary, gets to interact with the world and intentions of the author, his own world of references, his own associations, which can create a new reading: '' generating a text means implementing a strategy that includes the predictions of the moves of others ''. An 'open work' is precisely the one that most succeeds in producing multiple interpretations, adapting to changing times and finding connections with different sciences and disciplines.



A thesis that appeared disruptive in a country tied to its traditional aesthetic categories, divided between Crocianism and historicist Marxism. And Eco's speech obviously does not concern only the form, the structure of a work, as many authors of those years understood, so much so that shortly after he published The absent structure, which shifted the discourse on semiological research and its interactions . Thus, perhaps, the most exemplary attempt to put his theories into practice, is in 2004 The mysterious flame of Queen Loana, a novel illustrated with photos of books and magazines, posters, comic strips, which are part of the story and they help to revive the atmosphere of the time (from the end of the 1930s to the war) to every reader also with their own memories.



In short, even a novel by a character and scholar of this type, attentive to mass culture and already the author of paradoxical and ironic pages on minor aspects of reality collected in the Minimal Diary in the 1960s, was born within this spectrum of references with a wisdom, not only constructive and intellectual. And the international success, with the Name of the Rose, of a refined essayist, of a scholar who had made his debut graduating on aesthetic problems in San Tommaso, ended up arousing more controversy than his innovative non-fiction theories. If many speak of a '' brilliant and very remarkable book '' as summed up by Maria Corti, here for Geno Pampaloni there was a '' lack of literary genius '', Francesco Alberoni called it a '' book without emotions ''which owes its fortune to having become a fetish of culture, while Stefano Benni '' closed on page thirty, assailed by boredom ''. Then the other novels will come, other best sellers that consolidate his fame and soften his bitterness: Foucault's pendulum in 1988, The island of the day before 1994 and Baudolino 2001, The mysterious flame of Queen Loana 2004 and The Prague cemetery. In 2010.



Once again, through the history in the nineteenth century of the tragic and gradual flourishing of that falsification known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which will also inspire Hitler, a novel of broad interweaving, rich in scholarship disseminated with elegance and to that extent that it engages the common reader, but not too much, introducing him with narrative wisdom into an engaging reality of ideas and history.

Until the last novel on the world of journalists and publishing, Numero Zero.

In short, there are many reasons to celebrate the greatness of Umberto Eco, just accept that they coexist in this discreet and nice gentleman, who as an amateur played the recorder and certainly was not afraid of exposing himself by declaring his ideas, including political ones, as he did in the Berlusconian years, the curious and ironic author of the Sachets of Minerva or novels set in the past and the highly scientific scholar of the Treatise on general semiotics, which is now 25 years old.

Source: ansa

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