[applause] Michael Enright: Thank you. Good evening and buona sera. Welcome. "Entering a novel is like going on a climb
in the mountains. You have to learn the rhythms of respiration,
acquire the pace, otherwise you stop right away." Now, you'll notice that in that quotation,
our guest, Umberto Eco, uses the term, "entering" a novel, not "reading" a novel but "entering." And it's most appropriate, because when you
start an Umberto Eco novel, you are indeed entering something. A new, strange, often unexplored, sometimes
threatening, often hilarious world, and you do indeed have to adjust your rhythms of respiration. For decades, he has dazzled millions of readers
with daring leaps of language and narrative within the literary imagination. He was 48 when he wrote his first novel "The
Name of the Rose" and he wrote it, he said, "because I felt like poisoning a monk." [laughter] ME: It became an immediate international phenomenon,
selling more than 20 million copies. Mr. Eco was born in the city of Alexandre
in the Piedmont region of Italy. Ignoring his father's advice to become a lawyer,
he decided instead to study medieval philosophy and literature at the University of Turin. He said he developed a passion for the middle
ages the way some people develop a passion for coconuts. He also began a lifelong study of modern media
and symbolism, and he's one of the world's leading semioticians. His latest novel, "The Prague Cemetery" is
a darkly comic and hypnotic examination of hate, pure and simple. Let me correct that, there is nothing in the
novel that is pure and simple. His central character is despicable, without
any obvious saving human qualities, but at the same time he's one of the most interesting
characters in recent literature. "The Prague Cemetery" has already become a
best seller in Europe and is sure to do the same in North America. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Umberto Eco. [applause] ME: Welcome, thank you for coming, joining
us tonight. Before we talk about the book and literature
and so on, I want to ask you something quite off topic, the recent death of Steve Jobs
reminded me of an essay you wrote back in the 90s, in which you said that the Apple,
the Mac was Catholic and the PC, Microsoft, was Protestant. Umberto Eco: Yes. It was before Windows. ME: What did you mean? UE: It was before Windows. ME: Oh, good. I'm glad. Oh, I'm glad, yes. UE: Because Windows is Anglican. It's the Church of England. [laughter] The Church of England, half-Catholic
and half... ME: How is Apple Catholic? And be careful how you tread because... UE: It was Catholic in the sense in which
it was counter-reformist. Everything is clear by paintings and tells
people what to think, what to believe. While PC, at the time in which you have still
to make your program with the basic, you were in a private relationship with The Bible. You had to make a personal interpretation,
and so it was not so easy... It was not so collective, the feeling, everybody
had the personal relations with Bill Gates instead of God. [laughter] ME: But, my concern is which operating system
guaranteed your entrance into heaven? [laughter] UE: Or into hell. ME: Or hell, yes, yes. UE: Which sometimes is the same. [laugher] ME: You said that, in the writing of "The
Prague Cemetery" you wanted to write about... You wanted to create, I guess, the most hateful
character in literature, this was what you set out to do. UE: Yes. ME: Why? UE: It was very naive, because then I, reflecting
upon that, I must say that the colleague of mine, Shakespeare did his best in creating
Richard III or Iago and the Fagin of Dickens was not so bad, so I am not alone. But Simone Simonini is a forger that, among
other things, that creates the, in my novel, "The Protocols of Elders of Zion". ME: The Elders of Zion. He's a terrible a man. UE: He is a racist, a full-fledged racist,
not only anti-Semite, anti-German, anti-French, anti-Italian, anti-women. And so manoeuvring, using such a dirty material
as old, the racist cliche, I had to keep the reader and myself maybe, far away from the
character, so I had to create a totally unrecognizably negative character. The fact that then once started this endeavour,
a narrator feels that the taste and the pleasure of making his character more and more repugnant. Okay, that is unavoidable. ME: Is it more, I don't know if "fun" is the
right word, is it more interesting to you to create a character of absolute evil rather
than one of absolute good? UE: No, no, in my novel, I have very nice
characters that I love and with whom I could identify. No, no. But in this case, I had to create a bad guy. ME: He's a virulent anti-Semite. UE: Yes. ME: And has never met a Jew. [laughter] UE: As many racists... ME: He dreams about them. UE: He is the grandchild of alleged historical
character, the grandfather, Simonini, who was, so to speak, the creator of all the set
of cliches of the 19th century anti-semitism with a letter he wrote to the abbott Barruelo. Nobody knows if that Simonini really existed
and whether even that letter was a forgery, but in any case, it was published and republished
and widely circulated, not only public but in the secret services, Vatican, the secret
police of Napoleon III, and so it influenced the 19th century anti-semitism. My Simonini who is the grandchild receives
being practically an orphan because the mother dies and the father wasn't a hero, there's
always a way to fight for... So he lived under the oppressive shadow of
these reactionary. Grandfather was imbued with those ideas even
though he never met except Dr. Freud when he was in Paris. ME: It is a novel and yet when it was published
and certainly when it was published in Italy, the chief rabbi of Rome, the Vatican newspaper,
L'Osservatore Romano, criticized you saying that you might taint readers with the scourging
brush of anti-semitism. UE: Yes, nobody pronounces such a word as
anti-semitism. In both cases they said, "Even considering
the good intentions of the author, there is the risk." But they were two different attitudes. L'Osservatore Romano was shocked by the fact
that the Jesuits and the Pope Leo XIII, play a very painful role in this story because
they committed a lot of mistakes in the case of Leo Taxil and L'Osservatore Romano, at
that time, was one of the big anti-semites. So, since they couldn't react defending the
Pope, they tried to say, "You are disturbing the Jews." So the fact that L'Osservatore Romano in order
to defend the Jesuits plays the produce... It is an interesting case. ME: What about the Chief Rabbi though? UE: That is another... Before publishing the book, I wanted ten Jewish
friends of mine to read it in order to have advice. In fact, one of them said, "For the Jews,
no problem. I think that the Jesuits would be upset." [laughter] UE: But they have the same initials, so sometimes... And they had this meeting with the Chief Rabbi
who, in fact, he loved the book but he expressed a pre-occupation. I would say if I were the Chief Rabbi of Rome
probably I would express the same pre-occupation that can be weak readers that can take seriously
all those cliche. My objection at that time was, "But these
people, they push a button on Internet, they can find all these every day without the control
of an author." But the good objection came from another Rabbi
in Rome and from the Director of the Schwab Museum. They said, "For stupid, politically correctedness,
we try not to mention any longer those cliche because it's so vulgar, and so we are making
people to ignore that they are still there circulating. So it's important to spell them aloud." It was a real objection that seems to me,
at the end one of those people said that the book should be read in the schools in order
to understand what racist is. ME: But in "Foucault's Pendulum", one of your
characters says, "Be careful about kidding people or fooling people, they might believe
you." UE: Yes, certainly. ME: Is that a concern? UE: You are not responsible of the perversion
of your readers. [laughter] Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton, an eminent Catholic figure
became... ME: Benedictine monk. UE: Became a Benedictine Monk, you know how? By reading James Joyce, "A Portrait of an
Artist" which is the story of an apostasy. So you see, everything can happen. So somebody can read Thomas Merton and commit
apostasy and become an artist. It depends on the rate of the perversion of
your reading because there is a way to respect text. You cannot say that The Bible encourages the
killing of his own brother only because it tells the story of Cain. And there was an interesting review in the
States last week, who said that at that point, we should say that it's dangerous to read
the James Bond novel, because you can become like Blofeld or Dr. No. ME: The villains. Yes. You were raised Catholic and then you drifted
away when you were in university, I take it. Did you abandon the church? Or did the church did you feel abandon you? Was there some... UE: Both. ME: Both? UE: Both. Because I felt, I was one of the members of
a Catholic Organization, I was one of the national, nation of people directly and at
a certain point, we were charged with excessive leftism. ME: Excessive leftism... UE: Leftism. ME: Quite virulent I understand. UE: And so it was the church to kick us off. And then step by step I abandoned the church
by working on St. Thomas Aquinas [laughter] like Thomas Merton. ME: That was your first... UE: My dissertation, my dissertation. ME: Thomas Aquinas? UE: Yes. Because being historically correct at every
point of the research in which I love my hero. And I still love him. But I put him in his exact historical landscape,
and it was there, not here. It was correct to do like that in order to
understand the novel, to understand him or her as belonging to a certain historical time
and period if not you commit a certain sandwich operations that are always erroneous. Okay. But this is an old story. Anyway I am still very linked to all these
people, Medieval people from St. Augustine to St. Thomas. They were very brilliant ones. ME: But you've written, in some of your essays,
you have written extensively about religion, the role of religion. And at one point, you said that we think we
live in a sceptical age when in fact we live in an age of extraordinary credulity that
we believe everything almost. UE: There is this sentence of Chesterton that
I like very much. Chesterton was a was a believer obviously,
and he said when people do not believe any longer in God, it is not that they believe
in nothing, they believe in everything, everything. So the more the religions, the great religions
decline, the more sex, new, new wave of situations, satanism suddenly grow up. ME: Is that because we are gullible or we
are afraid? UE: Because human beings need some form of
credulity always in order to survive. ME: In reading your novel, in reading "Prague
Cemetery", the reader goes through a catalogue of evil. A protocols... UE: Yeah. Because the Simonini not only makes that forgery
but... ME: Goes after Dreyfus. UE: And kills some people for money. ME: But in the course of the journey through
the novel every once in a while you describe an extraordinary meal. It's almost, you give like almost a recipe
about, why do you bring food into... UE: That was a strange... We spoke about perverse reading, and I provoked
a perverse reading. It was a mistake on my part. I exaggerated in giving food to Simonini as
a substitute for sex, because he has no sexual... ME: That's right. UE: Activity except at the end, but we will
not reveal that. [laughter] ME: I certainly won't. No, no, no, no. UE: And I gave him food instead of sex, and
I wanted to disgust the reader, because each of those recipes is fantastic because I worked
on the texts of the 19th century of the real hotel and restaurant, so they are all real... Each of them is probably fantastic. All of them is a nightmare, is a nightmare,
but what for me was only Plato's sound. The sound of those names. For many... ME: Of the ingredients... Of the food. UE: Of the name, the name of the recipe, a
la Bourguignon... For many people, on the contrary, it was a
taste appeal. So they loved it. It made, against my will, Simonini at least
in this case, a little human. It gave him a passion, a passion, not for
ideas, not for human beings, but for food, for animal corpse. [laughter] ME: Could there be a possibility of a Captain
Simonini's recipe book, do you think? [laughter] UE: Yes, but that will go against my will
and encourage the perverse reading. ME: Of course. [laughter] UE: So you can do that. Me, I guess, again... ME: That's right, yes... Are there any heroes in "Prague Cemetery"? UE: Any? ME: Heroes, good guys. UE: There are two pure persons, they are killed. [laughter] One is Ippolito Nievo, the Italian
poet, who really died mysteriously. So mysteriously that I was free to invent
that Simonini was the one who killed him, because he was protecting certain secrets
of the Garibaldi expedition and so on and so forth. And the poor Maurice Joly, who was, without
knowing, one of the inspirators of the Protocols because when the London Times demonstrated
that the Protocols were fake, demonstrated by showing that many, many, many, many pages
of the Protocols were copied by this book of Maurice Joly, who was not against the Jews
but against Napoleon III, and one of my... I think of my discoveries is that Joly, if
not copied, was influenced by book of... By a popular novel by Eugène Sue, "Les Mystères
de Paris," in which the same arguments are used against the Jesuits. And... ME: Amazing to know. UE: "The Prague Cemetery," which we will speak,
was inspired to a scene of "Joseph Balsamo" of Alexandre Dumas, in which Cagliostro was
plotting not with the rabbis but with the Freemasons against the king of France. ME: Alright, that raises a interesting question
with a novelist writing about history, can you just make everything up or do you have
to abide by certain protocols respecting... UE: You have to respect absolutely the historical
truth, because it's always more fictional than fiction. [laughter] Take a character like Leo Taxil,
many people believe I invented him because they think it's... It was impossible that a man like that really
existed. ME: Explain... Yeah. UE: Leo Taxil is a man who spent his entire
life by lying, always inventing situation, inventing the sharks on the Gulf of Marseilles
and moving the French navy, inventing a submerged city in the Lake of Geneva, then invented
an enormous anti-Catholic series of books that at a certain point, he changed his mind,
and he became Catholic and made an enormous series of books against the Freemasons. Then he pivoted again, and he said that he
had done that in order to cheat the Catholic, and he became again a Freemason. But every moment, in every page of his immense
opus, he was always lying and forging and with such an ease, such a simplicity that
is prodigious. He existed, and he did exactly... ME: You did not make him up. You... UE: No, no, no, no, no. Oh, no, unfortunately I couldn't quite know
the 1,000 pages of him. He invented the most incredible stories, for
instance, that the Freemasons in order to destroy the world have a hideaway in the Rock
of Gibraltar, they were living as a... ME: How long is... Nothing. UE: People were believing all that, unfortunate,
even the Pope. That's why L'Osservatore Romano was irritated. But once again, I followed the historical
truth. When you write an historical novel, you have
absolutely to obey the historical truth. You cannot say George Washington spent his
vacations in Paris. No. And didn't cross the Potomac, but La Seine. But once respected, the... What we exactly know about the historical
character, seems that 80% of their life is unknown because we don't know what they did
on Friday. There you can insert invention, provided your
invention matches the psychological feature characterization... ME: It has to be credible of it. UE: Has to be credible. ME: At the end of the book, though, in, I'm
not going to give away anything, but in the afterward, you have a section which you've
called "Useless Learned Explanations." [laughter] And you say that this is because
the plot is so complicated and the characters are so, there are so many of them, this is
a guide, in a sense, to the plot and the characters, for readers that are sort of slow on the uptake. [laughter] Why did you put that in the novel? UE: Probably I had the model of Stuart Gilbert
of Joyce's "Ulysses". [laughter] ME: Oh, I see. Now, it's a chart and you have little explanation... UE: I had the impression that at a certain
point the intricate complexity of the flashbacks, flash-forwards, and so and so forth, was... Requested a terrible effort to the reader. Even though one can read the book without
that. But when I discovered that I, me too, I became
a victim of the problem. [laughter] Because since by writing the book
as it happens in the course of six years, you decide to move a certain scene or to the
chapter 35 but to the... So, I cut and pasted. At a certain moment, I lost my [laughter]
and happily, one of my translators, who started to translate immediately before the Italian
edition, said "But you say in the chapter so and so that Simonini goes in the cellar
and finds three corpses, but two of them are killed later." [laughter] Oh my God. That's why... [laughter] ME: That could be a problem. [laughter] Yeah. Do you write on a computer? UE: Yes. ME: You don't write in longhand, you go right
to the computer? UE: Sometime I feel the need to take a notes
with hands in order to go more slowly. Sometime I would like to have an obelisk [laughter]
and to carve... ME: Like the Rosetta stone or something. UE: Yes, because the computer is obviously
more literary than the hand because it follows the speed of your thought. Like in the surrealistic automatic writing. Because that you have not to pay attention
even to the errors, because you correct so you can follow your thought, the freedom of
your thought. But sometimes you feel the need to control
your thought and so the handwritten note can be... What I, we have abandoned is the poor typewriter. ME: The typewriter, yeah. UE: It was such a marvellous instrument. So it's only way to survive is the moment
in which there is the Olivetti 22 of the late '50s. ME: I was told you don't own a cellphone. You don't use a cellphone. Is that right? UE: I use? ME: A cellphone. A mobile phone. UE: Yes, but always out. ME: What do you mean always out? UE: It is very important because people believe
to reach me and they cannot because it's out. It's turned off. It's turned off. [laughter] ME: Doesn't that defeat the purpose somewhat,
of having it? UE: No. No. [laughter] Because it works as an agenda. [laughter] You take your notes. ME: But it's supposed to work as a phone. UE: Yes, but I don't want to receive messages,
and I don't want to send messages. [laughter] At my age, I have deserved the
right of not receiving messages. This world is overloaded with messages. And even each of them says nothing. ME: You wrote a series of essays once, in
which you went across the United States. You went to Disneyland. And you looked at Disneyland as a kind of
series of technologically perfect simulacrum, that... You said, I think in one of the essays, that
it's trying to teach us that technology can give us more than nature can. UE: Yes. But I was not the only one to make observations
like that. For instance, my old friend, who now died,
wrote a beautiful essay on Disneyland. In that book, the most original explorations
were in all the museums of reproduction, I saw twelve "Last Suppers" in California. [laughter] One in stained windows, another
in chalk. I saw "Venus of Milo" with the arms. [laughter] ME: Aboard the arms. Yes, yeah. UE: No, no, no... With arms like that. [laughter] While if you follow the logic of
the shoulders, the arms should be like that. ME: That's right. But you said, to take, to draw inferences
from when you're writing in those essays is that we live in a fake culture. Culture is fake, cities are fake, our literature
in a sense is fake. UE: Yes, yes and not. I had two problems. One, the model was the "Fortress of Solitude
of Superman" in which Superman has all the memories of his life in small form as a fake... As a fake, as a reproduction. And I found that this love for the reproduction,
what they cannot have here is a particular aspect of the American culture. Obviously, they cannot have Palazzo Strozzi
and there is in downtown New York, a Palazzo Strozzi, complete for the first four floors. Then there are 55 more floors that didn't
belong to the real Palazzo Strozzi. But at least... So that's typical of the American culture. But at the same time, that is, per me, some
suspicions about the European notion of authenticity. ME: Of authenticity. Yeah. UE: Of authenticity. Because when a... The myth of authenticity. Because when I saw, I don't remember whether
in Sarasota, the Ringling Museum, a Greek sculpture. And it was sad... There is a modern stone reproduction of a
Roman iron statue that was a reproduction of the original stone Greek statue. I realized that many of the Greek statues
we have in European museum were Roman reproductions. ME: Actually that's... Yeah. UE: So, instead of three passengers, we have
only two passengers. ME: Right. UE: Two mediations. But sometime, we do consider as real as original. But it's no more original. So it was at the same time, a sort of criticism
of European culture. So, mixed position. ME: Isn't that depressing for you? Doesn't that make you... UE: I am not using fakes. ME: No. UE: It can be depressing for those who take
them. ME: But you don't? You... I mean this is not... You don't think that our entire sort of Western
culture so defined, is crumbling into a kind of series of fake reproductions? UE: No. Because for instance, Internet gives you the
Roman statues and the Greek statues such as they are. ME: Right. UE: Internet is a return to alphabetic culture,
is a return to the original document. ME: Are you on Facebook? UE: No, I am not. The portable, they have no Facebook. ME: Oh you don't? Right. Right. UE: So...
