Italian writer died at the age of 84
With the death of Umberto Eco ended a whole epoch. Another thing is that the significance and meaning of this era will become clear later. As, however, it always happens. It’s not only that now his novels “the name of the rose”, “Foucault’s Pendulum”, “the Island of the day before”, “Baudolino”, “Prague cemetery” — each of which was, if not literary event, subject to scrutiny and criticism, and the public is finally moving into the category of classics, become part of the history of literature.
Although this, too. IVF has opened a special type of art and historical reconstruction (post-reconstruction, if you will). He trusted the facts and scientific knowledge and did not trust the imagination. Of course, in the novels he is much freer than in his scientific writings, but in them he was still a historian, a philologist, a specialist in semiotics. In the novels he played, in scientific studies has built a meticulous, detailed, strict schemas. Regardless of the subject of the study.
And he wrote, essentially, about everything: the middle Ages, of beauty and ugliness, about mass literature and tabloid novel, about translations, about their own works (by the way, fun experience of self-examination: a philologist Eco examines the works of Eco is the writer), on academic writing and methodology of the scientific approach, if not to take into account his numerous notes, essays and columns in glossy magazines. Polymath Umberto Eco is a complete encyclopedia.
It is curious that in the twenty-first century he retained the temperament and enthusiasm of a convinced positivist. Of course, Eco cartesianas, a rationalist, an enemy of mysticism and conspiracy. Symbolic, vague, ambiguous (not to mention the wonderful and mysterious) caused him the suspicion, ironic smile. A miracle for Eco was equal to the fantasy, that is a property of text, Convention, symbol and myth were only signs, allegorical letter. Eco’s novels, arranged not even the carnival, and masquerade, some comical procession of the “elders of Zion”, the masons, the crusaders. He played in history as chess or soldiers, he enjoyed plunging into the past, phycitinae from books. And, oddly enough, emphasized the scientific character, the pedantic philologist-scholar was pushed aside, have obscured the historical accuracy, made clearly noticeable, almost annoying aftertaste of literary, somewhat artificial. Eco involuntarily as if all the time made it clear to the reader — before it only the text, skillfully prepared facts and God be with him, “elevating deception”, you can do a professional slyness, irony.
Eco accumulated in not even school, not the direction, but tradition (a tradition) of the European worldview that grew out of Aristotelian thought, from medieval scholasticism, from the rationalism of the new time. And in this sense, the era of IVF far more than his earthly life, his historical presence.
