(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Umberto Eco was an Italian philosophy professor and author of both academic works and bestselling novels.
A text, he suggested, “is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work”, generating “a variety of possible conclusions without its author’s ordaining and limiting them in advance” (Eco 1988, 216; Eco 2004a, 3). It should be used “as a generator of intellectual stimulation”, “a machine for thinking” because it can say things of which the writer was unaware—their intentions don’t bound the meaning of the work (Eco 1988, 216). Yet its possible interpretations are not indefinite (Eco 1981, 81). Rather, literary interpretation is a game each generation plays wherein we are encouraged to experience a freedom of interpretation because texts “offer us a discourse that has many layers of reading and place before us the ambiguities of language and of real life” (Eco 2004b, 4–5).
A rule of this game is that we profoundly respect the intention of the text (ibid.). Texts “flag with supreme authority what we are to take as important in them, and what we must not take as a point of departure for freewheeling interpretations” (p. 5). There are facts which the reading community endorses, e.g. “that Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street, and that Clark Kent is the same person as Superman” (pp. 9–10). Further, “the internal textual coherence controls the otherwise uncontrollable drives of the reader” by requiring us to confirm our hypotheses against the text as a whole (Eco 1990, 59). Interpreting literature is maximally free yet governed by a means to determine bad evaluations that disregard commonly accepted facts or are contradicted by the text as a whole.
The original jacket of his novel The Name of the Rose (The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel 2003, 176–177):
listed three categories of readers (ideal Model Readers) Eco envisioned for the work: readers interested in the complex plot; readers attracted by the history of ideas who might see connections between the cold war of the twentieth century and the theological debates in the book; and readers aware of the fact that the novel was a palimpsest of other works, a “whodunit” of quotations, as Eco puts it
He conceived an integral part of the writing process to be foreseeing these model readers: envisaging the groups who will have sufficient “encyclopedic competence”, or background knowledge, to interpret the text in the same way it was written (Eco 1979, 7). Perhaps, then, we should consider what our authors expect of us, how to better fit their model, or whether other works would suit us better?
A well-organised text both presupposes such competence coming from outside the text, and works to build it up by textual means (p. 8). We acquire this competence in part because of intertextuality: “not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves” (Eco 2014b, 306). Texts cannot be read independently of our other experiences or ideological perspectives (Eco 1979, 22). This helps explain how rereading a text, especially having read another text in the interim, can result in a new interpretation for the same reader.
In The Name of the Rose a critical approach to reading is recommended: “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means” (Eco 2014b, 338). Eco makes a similar point in describing bad readers (Eco 2014a, 260):
What happens to those readers who are totally incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality? Their response produces no aesthetic effects, because they are so busy taking the story seriously they don’t ask whether it’s told well or badly, they make no attempt to learn from it, and they fail to identify with the characters. They simply exhibit what I would call a fictional deficit; they are unable to suspend disbelief.
Eco’s personal library contained thirty thousand books. Yet, this quantity of titles does not constitute “an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool” (Taleb 2007, 1). Eco’s philosophy is glossed as “Read books are far less valuable than unread ones” (ibid.). The more that you know, the larger your collection should be of what you don’t know. Taleb figures Eco as an “antischolar—someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device—a skeptical empiricist” (p. 2).
You respect books by using them, by annotating them (Eco 2015, 125–126). If you own a book, and it’s not an antique, your underlines and annotations “become traces of your interest. They allow you to return to the book even after a long period, and find at a glance what originally interested you” (p. 124). Eco made these remarks in the context of writing academic theses, and in this vein suggested we use note-cards to record: bibliographic information of books we’ve read and want to read, quotations linked to the corresponding bibliographic card, and connections between concepts and quotations (pp. 115–142). This sounds excessive for the average reader, but Eco’s heavy use of allusions and obscure intertextual references in his fiction suggests that he took this approach, especially the use of quotation and connection cards, outside of his academic work. In Foucault’s Pendulum the narrator writes (Eco 1989, 225):
I had cross-referenced index cards. … No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.
If we invest the time to formalise our reading in this way, we’re able to consume books disorderly: it allowed Eco to “meander, alternating his objectives, provided that a thick web of personal notes, possibly in the form of index cards, keeps track of these “adventurous” wanderings” (Eco 2015, 104).