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INTERVIEWER
Did the war have any impact on your decision to write?
ECO
No, there is no direct connection. I had started writing before the war, independently of the war. As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa. I was a perfectionist and wanted to make them look as though they had been printed, so I wrote them in capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, illustrations. It was so tiring that I never finished any of them. I was at that time a great writer of unaccomplished masterpieces. Obviously, however, when I began writing novels my memories of the war played a certain role. But every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.
INTERVIEWER
Did you show those early books to anyone?
ECO
It’s possible that my parents saw what I was doing, but I don’t think I gave them to anybody else. It was a solitary vice.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve talked before about trying your hand at poetry in this period. In an essay on writing, you said, “my poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.”
ECO
I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
INTERVIEWER
Who encouraged you in your literary endeavors?
ECO
My maternal grandmother—she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac. In her eyes, there was not much difference—they were all fascinating. My mother, on the other hand, had the education of a future dactylographer. She started French and German, and though she read a lot in her youth she succumbed to a sort of laziness when she got older, reading only romance novels and women’s magazines. So I didn’t read what she read. But she spoke gracefully, with a good Italian style, and wrote so beautifully that her friends asked her to compose their letters for them. She had a great sensitivity for language, even though she left school at an early age. I think I inherited from her a genuine taste for writing, and my first elements of style.
INTERVIEWER
To what extent are your novels autobiographical?
ECO
In some way I think every novel is. When you imagine a character, you lend him or her some of your personal memories. You give part of yourself to character number one and another part to character number two. In this sense, I am not writing any sort of autobiography, but the novels are my autobiography. There’s a difference.
INTERVIEWER
Are there many images that you’ve transferred directly? I’m thinking about Belbo playing the trumpet in the cemetery in Foucault’s Pendulum.
ECO
That scene is absolutely autobiographical. I am not Belbo, but it happened to me and it was so important that now I will reveal something that I’ve never said before. Three months ago I bought a high-quality trumpet for about two thousand dollars. To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was. I don’t feel anything for the violin, but when I look at the trumpet I feel a world stirring in my veins.
INTERVIEWER
Did you find that you could play the tunes of your childhood?
ECO
The more I play, the more vividly I remember the tunes. Certainly there are passages that are too high, too difficult. I repeat them several times, I try, but I know that my lips simply don’t react the right way.
INTERVIEWER
Does the same thing happen with your memory?
ECO
It’s odd, the older I get, the more I remember. I’ll give you an example: my native dialect was Alessandrino, a bastard Piedmontese with elements of Lombard, Emilian, and Genovese. I didn’t speak this dialect because my family came from the petite bourgeoisie, and my father thought that my sister and I should speak only Italian. Yet among themselves my parents spoke dialect. So I understood it perfectly but was unable to speak it. Half a century later, all of a sudden, from the cavern of my belly or from my unconscious, the dialect grew, and when I met my old friends from Alessandria I could speak it! So as time went by in my own life I was not only able to retrieve things I had forgotten, but things I believed I had never learned.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you decide to study medieval aesthetics?
ECO
I had a Catholic education and during my university years I ran one of the national Catholic student organizations. So I was fascinated by medieval scholastic thought and by early Christian theology. I started a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, but right before I finished it my faith suffered a trauma. It was a complicated political affair. I belonged to the more progressive side of the student organization, which meant that I was interested in social problems, social justice. The right wing was protected by Pope Pius XII. One day my wing of the organization was charged with heresy and communism. Even the official newspaper of the Vatican attacked us. That event triggered a philosophical revision of my faith. But I continued to study the Middle Ages and medieval philosophy with great respect, not to mention my beloved Aquinas.
INTERVIEWER
In the postscript to The Name of the Rose you wrote, “I see the period everywhere, transparently overlaying my daily concerns, which do not look medieval, though they are.” How are your daily concerns medieval?
ECO
My whole life, I have had innumerable experiences of full immersion in the Middle Ages. For instance, in preparing my thesis, I went twice for monthlong trips to Paris, conducting research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. And I decided in those two months to live only in the Middle Ages. If you reduce the map of Paris, selecting only certain streets, you can really live in the Middle Ages. Then you start to think and feel like a man of the Middle Ages. I remember, for instance, that my wife, who has a green thumb and knows the names of just about all the herbs and flowers in the world, always reproached me prior to The Name of the Rose for not looking properly at nature. Once, in the countryside, we made a bonfire and she said, Look at the embers flying up among the trees. Of course I didn’t pay attention. Later on, when she read the last chapter of The Name of the Rose, in which I describe a similar fire, she said, So you did look at the embers! And I said, No, but I know how a medieval monk would look at embers.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you might have actually enjoyed living in the Middle Ages?
ECO
Well if I did, at my age, I’d already be dead. I suspect that if I lived in the Middle Ages my feelings about the period would be dramatically different. I’d rather just imagine it.
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INTERVIEWER
Are you still obsessed with television?
ECO
I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses. And then I try to use it as material for my work. But I am not a glutton who swallows everything. I don’t enjoy watching any kind of television. I like the dramatic series and I dislike the trash shows.
INTERVIEWER
Are there any shows that you particularly love?
ECO
The police series. Starsky and Hutch, for instance.
INTERVIEWER
That show doesn’t exist anymore. It’s from the seventies.
ECO
I know, but I was told that the complete series was just released on DVD, so I am thinking of acquiring it. Other than that I like CSI, Miami Vice, ER, and most of all, Columbo.
INTERVIEWER
Have you read The Da Vinci Code?
ECO
Yes, I am guilty of that too.
INTERVIEWER
That novel seems like a bizarre little offshoot of Foucault’s Pendulum.
ECO
The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
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