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Umberto Echo, born in Italy in 1932, died on February 19, 2016. He is probably one of the most intelligent and erudite people in the world, a writer, a medieval scholar, a philosopher, a semiotician, a writer, a writer of more than 30,000 books, a wide range of writing, and a sharp and intelligent novel essay. Echo was funny, he would play, but only if he understood, or at least, he had been studying
Erudite and boring man
"I asked for a lawyer and they sent me an avocado."
The lawyer is "advocate" and the avocado is "avocado". "Traveling with Salmon", a famous little article written by Amberto Echo, when I read this sentence, "poof" rushed out, thinking that Uncle Echo finally made me unable to hold back. I'm a laughing poor man, not a poor humorist, when Echo said that there was a waiter in the hotel where he was staying, "The only language that can be spoken... It is a dialect that was only spoken in the Kafiristan region during the time of Alexander the Great's marriage to Roxana", I really thought he had two sons.
"Traveling with Salmon", although short, condenses two basic venues of Echo humor, one is the list, the other is the language. Language, embodied in this story as a narrow sense of language barrier, like "lawyer" and "avocado", which catches you off guard, takes place in a Hotel in London where Echo is staying, in which the Indian and Malaysian-run hotel is located, and the computer in the store is "just"broken. As for the list, it was really Echo's favorite:
"The refrigerator of the hotel is a family model, with 50 bottles of whiskey, gin, Scotch whisky liqueur, Napoleon cognac, etc., mineral water with 8 large bottles of Parisian water, 2 bottles of Vitour mineral water, 2 bottles of Evian, and 3 bottles of small champagne, many cans of Guinness, pale ale, Dutch beer, German beer, and white wine imported from France and Italy; snacks, in addition to peanut rice, there are all kinds of small snacks, almonds, chocolate..."
Echo later wrote a book called The Infinite List, which details the phenomenon of lists, which has always existed in texts throughout history: "From the Greeks to modern society, the occasional properties of a thing are infinite. He didn't mention, though, that making lists is also an effective humor technique. As the list is extended, the reader begins to expect something strange to mix in, and something that is not otherwise strange becomes strange, as if it contains some amount of information. Cross-talk writer Liang Zuo wrote in "Anxious" that a person took advantage of the increase in the price of non-staple food to hoard chai rice oil and salt: vinegar hit a bath basin, soy sauce two water tanks, peanut oil fifteen warm bottles, monosodium glutamate eight drawers, pepper noodles a large wardrobe ... The hero sees the same thing.
Text has two dimensions. First, the written word will vary from language to language; second, the written word will extend indefinitely. In The Book of Humorous Sketches integrated by the column "Traveling with Salmon," we see a traveler Aiko who flies around all day (and thus meets many languages), and an Echo who looks twice at any of the text products on the trip (so the list is made). For example, when he flipped through the magazine on the plane, he listed the various fresh inventions introduced in the magazine (obviously a large proportion of them were the result of his own brain supplement, but no one would carefully study the proportions): "Nasal Automatic Locator", "Perfect Functional Blanket", "Men's Bathroom Intimate Treasure", "Seasoning Automatic Selector", "Jurassic Glove"...
Echo also has a good play, that is, philology. Look at him listing the version information of the cold ancient books one hundred and fifty, a serious book that makes you seriously suspect that it is all nonsense, but the person who plays this set is just an expert. It is not a person who has specialized in linguistics and poetics, it is impossible to write "Three Owls on the Chest of Drawers", "Legend of the Interstellar Empire" is like a pseudo-science fiction by an astronomical enthusiast who is proficient in military deployment and quartermaster, and in "The Organization Can Be Found", the ins and outs of the Knights of Malta, its branches and branches, constitute a maze, in which the characters involved are written with names and surnames, and it is also a lengthy list.
One of Echo's most famous portraits, with a cigarette roll and his head supported, as if facing the camera was a helpless thing: Shoot me? Do? I'm such a learned and boring man.
Everything is symbolic
Echo was funny, he would play, but only if he understood, or at least, he had been studying. Echo's best-known book, the first edition of the 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, about murder in a monastery in the 14th century, is centered on a supposedly lost work: the comedy part of Aristotle's Poetics. The novel was part of a writing project that invited some writers who already had a literary name to try out detective novels, but Echo wrote a super bestseller. He used all his medieval knowledge in it, and after saying it in small words, it was translated into more than thirty languages and marketed all over the world.
Why set up a comedy-themed book and nothing else? Echo once said that he arranged such a core secret in the novel because he could not sort out the logic of comedy/humor. That's play. As for the principle of comedy/humor, Echo has maintained a lifelong interest, although like many of his predecessors, he has not been able to understand the mystery of laughter. Human laughter and humor have overwhelmed the brains of highly intelligent theorists, and its core always slips when people think they are about to arrive; no definition of humor is satisfactory. For this reason, echoes wrote two large books on artistic themes in his later years: "The History of Beauty", which explores the sense of sublime, and "Ugly History", which explores humor, humor, and irony, the latter is far inferior to the former, lacking system and fragmentation. But he's done his best.
The most accurate evaluation of "The Name of the Rose" came from the great British critic David Lodge. Rocky, who is 3 years younger than Echo, met in a meeting in 1979 and immediately became acquainted, and Rocky felt that both of them had a sense of humor and chattiness on the same channel. He said that Echo grasped the essence of postmodernism, that the Name of the Rose had a rigorous structure, and that the scholarly debates of the monks were as solemn as heavenly questions, but that the author of the book believed that man created God, not that God created man, and that religion had nothing to do with God, but that human beings longed to know the origin of life and the scene after death, so they invented it. Lodge's insight was confirmed by the Vatican: the Holy See angrily denounced The Name of the Rose, saying that it attacked and dismantled the orthodox faith, and Echo attempted to lead the Lambs to the wrong path.
We watched the fire from the other side and enjoyed Echo's fun, but in fact, there were many critics. After all, since the age of 24, Echo has been a frequent visitor to higher education institutions in Milan, Turin, Florence, Bologna and other cities, teaching aesthetics, architecture, and semiotics. In 1962, he published his first influential masterpiece: the collection of essays "Open Works", which is also quite academic. However, he declares that the reader has the right to interpret a completed book at will, regardless of the author's intentions, which is not a small shock (and perhaps an ominous premonition). Sure enough, when his writing style was well-trained, fusing ancient rare books, high-headed sermons with star prostitutes and personal unspeakable secrets, one by one, they came out one by one.
In fact, before being hyped into a star writer by "The Name of the Rose", Echo's academic works had already produced many, such as "Semiotic Theory" and "The Role of the Reader". He also has a book called "How to Write Papers", which can be described as a "work of distress", written in the context of the decline of humanities in the expanding Italian universities since the 1970s, and many people read literature, history and philosophy, but very few people will go to teaching positions or as editors and journalists in the future. Echo has always been a realist, and he knows that there are only a few students in Italian universities who are willing to engage in writing and research; they can hardly improve their social status by obtaining degrees, and in turn, the burnout of students further devalues the degrees.
However, Echo disagreed with the elitist theory of education. Opening up to the public is the only way to go, but the traditional way of teaching is no longer applicable. He still insisted on the necessary academic training, so he wrote "How to Write a Paper", explaining in detail why people who do academic research will benefit far more than just writing papers.
Disappointed in the "serious" industry, he went to write a novel to "entertain himself". However, in Echo's eyes, academic research is the fertile ground for true growth and pleasure. If nothing else, it was to index the books and materials, and Echo felt that it was a great enjoyment. He wrote with relish in "How to Write a Thesis", each card should be a different color, the upper right corner of the card should have an abbreviation, in order to make a connection between one set of cards and another set of cards, card A leads to card B, card B leads to card C...
Infinite citations, infinite lists (the same name as Echo's other book) – Echo believes that making more and more index cards, or writing down the information needed to see things in notebooks or loose-leaf books, and looking at these books more and more are extraordinary and satisfying achievements. This, of course, requires the researcher to be able to slow down, not to rush, to enjoy the process, not to go straight to the result; it is a discipline of precision and responsibility, and it is also a discipline of innovation. Be open and dare to make your own value judgments.
But how many people can share the joy of a man who sees everything in the world as a symbol, wanders through it, and enjoys the infinite citation of symbols and symbols? How many people can see something exciting in the appendix of an academic book, from a manual for electrical appliances, from a newspaper classifieds, from a yellowed card with pen letters written in a drawer?
"Echo's Response"
Metaphysical, theological, and legendary Aristotle's poetic theory, strung together a classical speculative novel featuring a deformed Sherlock Holmes, "The Name of the Rose" pushed Echo, a professor of semiotics, to the public, and his fame instantly exceeded the fame of more than twenty of his previous academic monographs combined. Although he is very talkative, Echo is not ready to be a star, and he and the spotlight do not look at each other. In 2000, when he published his fourth novel, Puerto Reno, which was unsurprisingly a bestseller, Echo was thoroughly tired of the flying reader meetings, signings, and banquets, and his reputation was more important than his addiction to smoking.
He often teased the media, often telling a joke: he had collected a whole bunch of newspaper reviews, all in All Indo-European languages, with titles that were pretty much the same, from "The Echo of Eco" to "A Book with Echoes," all of which were stale articles about his last name. "Some of them are probably not the author's intention, it was changed by the newspaper editor," and then he continued to make up his mind, a group of editors held a meeting, the editor-in-chief proposed that the title should be used as a word game with "Eco", the editors praised it, and the editor-in-chief was complacent: "Talent, talent only." ”
Stills from the movie "The Name of the Rose"
"The Name of the Rose", "Foucault Pendulum", "The Island of Yesterday", "Puerto Reno", a series of encyclopedic novels have been published for more than twenty years; the media is very cheap, as long as Echo becomes a hot topic, it will engage in so-called "polls", and then it is not surprising to announce that Echo's books are bought by more people and read less people - cough, and the significance of putting on a façade is even greater.
Isn't that normal? ——I prepared an answer for Ai Lao--whether I bought a book for the purpose of installing a façade, where did my library come from?
I don't know if Ai Lao is satisfied. I mean, like a lot of ordinary book lovers, I'm very impressed with Echo's private library—what a self-deprecating asset it is. The joy of the "Infinite List" reappears: how much laughter can a person who collects the Book of Infinity with an endless life have. For example, after reading a book and forgetting the source, the laborers go far to find the gray-headed face, and the blood pressure rises; for example, one book clearly remembers where it is, and the result is that the other book stays there mischievously, and then it is time to interrogate the nanny, the housekeeper, the hostess one by one...
Image from the web
However, Echo seems more enthusiastic to defend the rationality and necessity of the existence of a private library, painting portraits of amorous people who do not know how to read books. "People who have a huge library, like me," he said, "whoever wants to enter my room can only see the library head-on, because it occupies all the places." Visitors enter the door and shout, so many books, have you read them? "Alas, people think that the bookshelf is a place of storage, that it is enough to store the books that have been read, and they do not think that the library is a production tool, like the kitchen is to the housewife, and the cellar is to the winemaker. The fear of books is based on "anxiety about learning": "I believe that in front of a large row of books, everyone will be caught up in the anxiety of learning, and will inevitably ask that question, expressing his pain and sentimentality." ”
In 1993, a very important year in Echo's life, he founded a faculty of communication disciplines, with himself as dean, affiliated with the oldest institution of higher learning in Europe, the University of Bolognea, which began in echo of the middle ages, when Eco was most fascinated, and where he had been teaching for many years. At the same time, he converted his long-lived hotel in Milan into a private apartment, turning the corridor into a grand library. In addition, the Echoes have an apartment in Paris and a private house converted from a 17th-century church near Urbino, Italy. It was surrounded by mountains, giving his work absolute silence.
Humorous rebellion
Also in 1993, in a hotel in New York, Echo, with his body freshly recovered from pneumonia, told a visiting New Yorker reporter, Adam Pratt, that he had 30,000 books in his library. He also revealed the message that War and Peace he didn't read until he was 41 years old.
No wonder David Lodge can read the jokes throughout the palatial Name of the Rose! After entering the door of semiotics and structuralism, Echo came into contact with the classics of literary grand narratives. Looking at Echo's library like this, and thinking about the thief's brain that the ancient and pseudo-ancient books show in his articles... The 30,000-volume collection is not so much the crystallization of human spiritual wealth as it is simply a "tool of production."
After using these tools to complete "Puerto Reno", it was revealed that Echo, who was nearly seventy years old, was looking for roots. Some novelists have spent their whole lives writing about themselves, and Echo has never written about himself, only about things that are far away in time and space, but the place where the story of "Puerto Reno" takes place, the italian town of Alexandria, is his hometown. There, his grandfather was a bookbinder, and his grandmother loved to read. During World War II, Echo hid in his basement and read many books by candlelight, marco polo's travels, Jules Verne's novels, Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and many hip-hop popular adventure stories.
Open works
David Lodge once lamented that the people who play structuralism, semiotics, postmodern and deconstruction, especially in its important town of France, are all veterans of obscure writing, and the more terms are piled up, the higher the reading threshold. The exception is Echo (in the end, it is the Italians, descendants of Machiavelli). Although he was involved in the creation of Grupo 63, a pioneering group influenced by Roland Bart, Echo's writings, both academic and non-academic, were much more readable than Those of Bart. There is no humanities discourse that can exist without caring about the reader's feelings, and the world is already full of discourse, full of books, and who want to create discourse and books, must let the reader find new pleasure. Whether it's about Thomas Aquinas, James Bond, fascism, semiotics, or the messy relationship between the Medieval Knights of Malta and his ancestors, Echo thinks about how to make the reader read with insight, pleasure, and preferably laughter.
So back to humor, back to laughter. In The Name of the Rose, a group of monks insist that Jesus never laughed, because if Jesus had a sense of humor, all the subtle interpretations of the Gospels throughout the ages, and the most crucial link in the faith—the fear of God—would collapse in an instant.
Echo said a famous quote that is difficult to translate: both comic and humor are subversive, funny is perception of opposite, and humor is feeling of opposite. In religion, people are very alert to funny, and they regard humor as the enemy, because humor means that a person can not only perceive rebellion, but also enjoy rebellion. Like Echo, he is good at and willing to "feel" the possibility of rebellion contained in a thing, and his brain is always detonating bombs. This feeling is unexplainable. In an interview with the Paris Review, Echo admits:
Animals lack a sense of humor. We know that animals can play, they will be sad, they will cry, they will feel pain. When they play with us, we can tell they're happy, but we don't have evidence that they have a sense of humor. Humor is a typical human experience that encompasses... No, I can't tell.
Echo really couldn't say it, but when the questioner asked, he spoke of "death." He said that we are the only animals that know that we must die, and that other animals know that they are going to die only when they are dying. All life has death, this is the truth that only people understand, religion and ritual are born from this, and humor is also the reaction of human beings because of the fear of death. At the end of the interview, he also left a suspense that was not a suspense. He said he might tell others that his writings contain a theory of humor: "Perhaps, when I die, people will spend a lot of time looking for my secret book." ”
I am not interested in secret books, nor do I care whether Echo's collection of books will be disposed of by his children after his death. 84 years old, did he go away with a smile? I caught a consonant sentence in my head that was incomparable to "lawyer-avocado", but from the heart: I used to think of you as humor, and now I know that you are just a human.
Special writer | Yun also retired as editor| Zheng Tingxin