Umberto Eco

Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction

Michael Caesar

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745608501
  9780745608495
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745665948
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the work and thought of Umberto Eco - one of the most important writers in Europe today.

1

Form, Interpretation and the Open Work

On form and interpretation: from Croce to Pareyson

Eco’s aesthetic was formed under the guidance of the Catholic philosopher Luigi Pareyson. Pareyson’s theory of ‘formativity’ was one of several lines of research in the 1940s and 1950s to challenge what for many had become the dogmatic and ultimately sterile idealism of Benedetto Croce. For the post-Crocean generation, there were vast tracts of the artistic and aesthetic landscape which Croce had not simply ignored, but had peremptorily decreed were no concern of the philosopher’s. His insistence on imaginative, or lyrical, intuition as the only valid component of the aesthetic experience – ’Let me say straight away, as simply as possible, art is vision or intuition’¹ – entailed a number of explicit exclusions: art is not a physical fact, it is not a utilitarian act intended to produce pleasure, it is not a moral act. Translated into the perspective of his critics, these exclusions meant that Croce had displayed sovereign indifference to the materiality of the work of art, to the historical conditions of its production, to the processes of conceptualization through which the work of art came into being, to the positive role played by convention and rhetoric (dismissed by Croce as ‘precepts’, in a rearguard polemic with a long-dead classicism), and to the reception and consumption of the work. All this in spite of the fact that is evident to any reader of Croce that he was a superb historian, an acute reader of literary texts, even, perhaps especially, the most obscure, and a wonderful writer, whom Eco was later to describe, in a 1991 review of a new edition of Croce’s Estetica, with an adjective that might harbour some ambiguity, as ‘overwhelming’ (scrittore travolgente: KO, p. 387).²

As Eco’s horizons widened beyond his Turinese education in the middle and late 1950s, other alternatives to Croce came into view. From America, where the New Criticism appeared to perform a similar role to Crocean idealism, the pragmatism of John Dewey in Art as Experience offered a valuable antidote; already in 1957, on the other hand, Eco could use a review of Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature in Italian translation to regret its lack of interest in the ‘consumption’ of the work of art on the grounds that: ‘to think about the work of art in terms of consumption, extra-aesthetic consumption in and for daily life, is one sign that a given historical period is substantially healthy.’³ Later, other Italian critics and aestheticians such as Luciano Anceschi, Gillo Dorfles and Dino Formaggio would illuminate further aspects of the ‘making’ of a work of art – rhetoric, poetics, technique, the fact that it is above all a ‘work’ – which constitute the key facets of the turn against Croce; a distinctive contribution is made by the Marxist critique of intuitionism elaborated by Galvano Della Volpe in his rigorous polemics for the rationality of art, especially in Critica del gusto (1960). But Pareyson was particularly important for the young Eco. He was his teacher in the energetic Department of Philosophy at Turin, and looking back on Opera aperta nearly thirty years later Eco would acknowledge its debt to a ‘secularized’ version of Pareyson’s ideas on interpretation (LII, p. 20; cf. LIE, p. 50, which, however, omits the reference to ‘secularization’). It was Pareyson who at the time had proposed the most comprehensive aesthetic after Croce: his Estetica had appeared in instalments in the journal Filosofia between 1950 and 1954, and was published in book form in the latter year. Pareyson’s ‘theory of formativity’, where the word ‘formativity’ replaces the ‘ambiguous’ notion of ‘form’,⁴ emphasized the twofold dynamism of artistic form, as something that is made (or done – the Italian fare may cover both senses) and as something organic. This emphasis on the work of art as ‘production’ rather than ‘expression’ necessarily affects the mode of its reception: with Pareyson, neither ‘intuition’ nor ‘empathy’ plays a part in our response to the work; as readers or viewers or listeners, we ‘interpret’. By the same token, at the other end of the line that joins the ordinary reader to the theoretical aesthetician, Pareyson’s aesthetics is not ‘a metaphysics of art’, but ‘an analysis of the aesthetic experience’.⁵

Eco’s review of Estetica, which appeared in Lettere italiane in July 1955, was subsequently incorporated into a longer essay on ‘L’estetica della formatività e il concetto di interpretazione’ (DA, pp. 9-31), partially translated into English as ‘Form and Interpretation in Luigi Pareyson’s Aesthetics’ (OW, pp. 158-66), and at this point we may join Eco in his account of a theory of interpretation which is at the same time a mapping-out of the territory of aesthetics. The concept of interpretation, which is as central to Pareyson’s theory as is that of formativity, occasioned controversy in the 1950s in particular because it did not admit of any substantial difference between the normal appreciation of a work of art and specialized critical discourse. The theory developed as a critique of Croce’s views on theatrical and musical performance. Croce regarded the theatrical performance as a new work, as something different from the original text; musical performance, on the other hand, he regarded as a ‘re-creation’ of the original, thus assuming the continuity of the work in its performance, but denying any autonomy to the performer. Pareyson objected, first of all, in the name of the Crocean principle of the unity of all the arts, that the notion of performance (esecuzione) should be extended to them all. Notwithstanding the specific and material differences between the arts, Pareyson believed that ‘every kind of work requires a performance, even a purely inner one, one that makes it come alive again in the experience of the receiver’ (DA, p. 19). He also drew attention to the contradiction of Croce’s position, whereby the performance was either the faithful rendition of the work or it was the expression of the personality of the performer. Croce could not accommodate both the unity of the work and the multiplicity of its performances because, in his view, ‘the spirit neither interprets nor performs, for either it creates new works or re-evokes those which it has created’ (quoted DA, p. 20).

Pareyson, by contrast, puts forward a theory of knowledge which is intimately linked to the process of figuration. Knowledge is a continual exchange between the stimuli offered by reality as ‘cues’ and the hypotheses that the person puts forward in response to the cues in order to give them a shape and a meaning. The process of figuration leads to a form which is itself the occasion for successive interpretations. The process is actualized in form and this means that it is constantly open to the possibility of being re-interpreted, albeit from the position of the producer (‘to interpret means to assume the point of view of the producer’), in following the same tentative path that led to the work. Pareyson points to the gap between ‘work’ and ‘performance’. The two are identical, but at the same time the ‘work’ (which at this point seems close to an ‘idea’ of the work) transcends the particular form which the artist has finally achieved:

Just as the artist could intuit, in the intrinsic disorder of the cues, the outlines of a future order, so will the interpreter refuse to be dominated by the work as a completed physical whole, and will instead try to situate himself at the beginning of the process and to re-apprehend the work as it was meant to be. (DA, p. 26/OW, p. 163)

We may discern here germs, or more than germs, of future Echian positions. The dialectic between ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ will be a constant presence in Eco’s thinking from Opera aperta on;⁶ less immediately, the variable hierarchy suggested in the passage from artist to interpreter and back again may suggest the relation between ‘idiolect’ and ‘lexicon’ which will be explored in La struttura assente and discussed here in chapter 3. This is not to ignore the strongly personal and interpersonal nature of Pareyson’s aesthetics. For the latter the notion of interpretation is closely linked to his idea of style as a ‘way of forming’, that point at which the process of formation and the personality of the form-giver coincide. The only ‘knowledge’ which the artist necessarily establishes is that of his or her concrete personality which has become a ‘way of forming’. This position enables the sociological critic to approach the historical arena through the personality of the ‘form-giver’, and it is opposed to the ‘impersonality’ of the artist argued for by Eliot, Joyce and New Criticism. The permanence of the work in the infinity of its interpretations is made possible for Pareyson precisely by the polarity between the two personalities in play, that of the form-giver and that of the interpreter: ‘The work lives only in the interpretations that are given of it’ (DA, p. 30/OW, p. 165). Interpretation takes place in an atmosphere of ‘congeniality’, based on the fundamental oneness of different forms of human behaviour, but also on an act of trust and loyalty towards the work, and of openness towards the personality of the artist; a trust and openness, however, which are exercised by another personality, which would be excluded from interpretation if it were confronted by a work that was closed and defined for ever. The specificity of the personality, experience, likes and dislikes of the receiver is not a barrier to, but an opportunity for interpretation.

There is in Pareyson’s aesthetic a very close link between the genesis of the work, its formal properties and possible reactions on the part of the receiver; while the New Criticism formalists tend to keep these three distinct, and to concentrate on the second, they cannot be separated in the theory of formativity. ‘A work consists of the interpretive reactions it elicits, and these manifest themselves as a retracing of its inner genetic process – which is none other than the stylistic resolution of a “historical” genetic process’ (DA, p. 31/OW, p. 166).

Art and rationality

Unlike his teacher, Eco does not, at this stage at least, write an aesthetic. The numerous reviews, conference papers, catalogue presentations, articles and more substantial essays that he wrote for both academic publications and cultural periodicals aiming at a wider audience in the 1950s and the early 1960s (many of the ones specifically concerned with aesthetic questions being subsequently collected in Opera aperta and La definizione dell’arte) approach the problems of the definition of art and the role of aesthetics itself from a particular angle, through the eyes of the critic, the historian or the ordinary reader. Pareyson’s commitment to a description of artistic phenomena and processes that is as comprehensive as possible and stresses continuities rather than ruptures is evident also in Eco’s multi-directional activity of this period, though it is only later, in the elaboration of a theory of semiotics, that he will come close to the synthesis that Pareyson achieves, and then in substantially different terms. What particularly exercise him in the years leading up to the publication of Opera aperta in 1962 and immediately afterwards are the relationships between the work and the reader, stimulus and response, ambiguity and analysis.

As Croce is firmly taken leave of, Eco shores up the defences against a possible return, by himself dismissing the positivism against which Croce’s idealism had been (at least in Croce’s eyes⁷) such a powerful device. A sociology of art, for example, can only take us so far, as Arnold Hauser himself acknowledges; it has to be ‘completed’ by ‘an organic-structural explanation’ (DA, pp. 42-3), one, however, that takes full account of the insights already gained by the methods of sociology. A series of essays establishes Eco’s distance from the ‘positivism’ of Raymond Bayer,⁸ and he is equally sceptical of Léon Bopp’s search for an ‘objective’ critical methodology at which Bopp hopes to arrive by means of a statistical tabulation of sixty-six ‘values’ derived from Lanson’s (obviously historically limited) Histoire de la littérature française (DA, pp. 50-5).

In all of these cases, Eco probes the question of what it means to talk about a work of art ‘scientifically’. It does not mean, as Eco makes clear in his essay ‘Note sui limiti dell’estetica’ (a fusion of two reviews, dated 1956 and 1959, now in DA, pp. 48-61), simply to list a series of known facts about the work, for a work of art is clearly more than the sum of its parts, and this is acknowledged when people speak of the ‘openness’ or ‘ambiguity’ or ‘multiple meanings’ (polisegnicità) of a work of art: the work of art ‘constitutes a communicative fact which demands to be interpreted [Eco’s emphasis], and therefore completed by something that the user [fruitore] brings to it’ (DA, p. 48). To talk scientifically about a work of art may therefore mean a series of different and complementary operations, each of which represents a particular level of use (from pure enjoyment to the most complex critical elaboration). It might mean to see the thing for what it specifically is, an object produced by a person who has given it that distinctive seal which is the manner in which he has produced it (this is Pareyson’s formativity). It might mean to try not to resolve the observation into an appreciation that is unexpressed or vague, but rather to clarify one’s impression in a way that communicates to others; to see whether there are elements in the work that will persuade others that one’s impression is correct, and to make one suppose that the producer actually intended to produce an essentially analogous impression; and to show how he managed to do so. It might mean, finally, analysing the complex and multi-layered structure underlying this impression, which is both formally pleasing and practically efficacious (because it communicates). This approach, Eco concludes, may be considered ‘scientific’ provided that one accepts that what is in play are human, and often highly subjective, opinions, tastes and desires. The problem of the scientific attitude in relation to works of art is essentially one of balance, of not making ridiculous claims.

This description of ‘speaking scientifically about a work of art’ is directed precisely at the individual work of art, and what Eco is describing is the relationship between the intentions of the producer, so far as they are discernible, the response of the individual user, and his or her success in communicating this response to others and convincing them of its validity. It is a snapshot of the circulation of the work of art in an interpersonal context, from the group of friends discussing a film to the critic expressing and trying to justify a judgement in a more formal setting. The key figure here, however, is that of the critic (‘il fruitore per eccellenza’, the user par excellence: DA, p. 60); the underlying question is the proper definition of the relation between the multiplicity of tastes (which is an indisputable fact) and the status of aesthetic reflection (any claim that aesthetics may have to establish universal rules of taste, or a universal canon of beauty, appears to be undermined by the accepted fact of the multiplicity of taste). In fact, Eco argues, aesthetics, at least since Kant, is not concerned with setting universal standards by following which judgement may be reached, but with establishing the possibility of judgement, that is to say, focalizing the dialectic between the objective properties of the work and the variety of responses to it and identifying within that space the opportunities for judgement. The method by which this is shown is that of the user recounting his or her experience of understanding and interpreting the work and submitting that account to the scrutiny of others. The attitude towards the work should be that of critical understanding, not dogmatic judgement.

I have referred to this little-known essay at some length because it articulates a credo from which Eco will not deviate substantially, as well as being a classic example of his ability to mediate tensions within the culture (in this case between ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’, or between Croce and anti-Croce) and to establish a base for his own position within the very act of mediation. The principal features of Eco’s aesthetic universe are beginning to appear: the defining complexity, multi-facetedness, ‘openness’ of the work of art, which, however, must also ‘communicate’; the equally open, but analytical, non-judgemental, stance of the ‘user’; the constant, and progressive, interaction between user and work.

We shall shortly examine in more detail the crucial idea of ‘openness’, but first it is necessary to say a few more words on the transaction between user and work, and the choices which it implies. In a 1959 essay on serial music (‘Necessità e possibilità delle strutture musicali’, now in DA, pp. 171-93), in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowoledgements
• Note on References
• Introduction
• 1 Form, Interpretation and the Open Work
• 2 A Critical View of Culture: Mass Communications, Politics and the Avant-garde
• 3 Introducing the Study of Signs
• 4 A Theory of Semiotics
• 5 Semiotics Bounded and Unbound
• 6 Theory and Fiction
• 7 Secrets, Paranoia and Critical Reading
• 8 Kant, the Platypus and the Horizon
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index