“Mysterious Flames”

Umberto Eco is certainly one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century, both in Italy and internationally. However, this influence is not always fully appreciated today. In Italy, Eco is still often seen as “the man who knew too much”, a prestigious and yet distant intellectual lost among the dusty books of his famous and vast personal library. He is best known as the author of The Name of the Rose (2016a), a novel originally published in 1980. In the public perception, this novel has become a “museum-like” narrative, an almost esoteric adventure, a consolatory novel for readers who seek recognition of their status as readers of “highbrow narratives”. Moreover, Eco is acknowledged for venturing into areas typically deemed beneath intellectual scrutiny. He analysed comic books (2015a: 131–272), TV presenters (2016b: 29–34), and B-list pop singers (2015a: 275–94). Yet, this engagement is often perceived as a postmodern divertissement, if not as the thinly veiled paternalism of an intellectual willing to “descend” towards the masses. The profound political and cultural implications of these writings, particularly in the context of twentieth-century Italy – arguably the most fascinating dimension of his work, alongside methodological questions – are frequently overlooked. Similar dynamics persist outside of Italy: Eco is often seen, on the one hand, as an author consigned to the now disavowed category of postmodernism, and, on the other hand, as one who made important contributions to media studies but did so with methods viewed as overly dense and unnecessarily complex. What is little known, however, is Eco’s significant influence on scholars who later pioneered fields like postcolonial and gender studies – Stuart Hall, whose connection to Eco is explored in this book, being a prime example – which are generally included within the field of Cultural Studies.

Yet, this book is not intended merely as an opportunity to acknowledge Eco’s significance in his own time, nor his reception in other fields of research. While it does take a historical perspective, this book seeks to shed light on aspects of great significance that have not been adequately considered in the past and that can support inquiry into contemporary issues, above all, the study of contemporary forms of fascism and the relationship between individual identity and society. These two issues are absolutely central to what is perhaps Eco’s least-studied novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004), which in fact constitutes the main focus of this book.1

The new approach that this book adopts falls within the emerging field of scholarly works rethinking Umberto Eco’s work beyond its traditional categories of interpretation. The recent publication of Umberto Eco il Pci (2016) by Claudio Crapis and Giandomenico Crapis is a crucial contribution to this trend. In this volume, the authors have republished and commented on two articles published by Eco in Rinascita in 1963 (1963a and 1963b), the weekly journal of the Italian Communist Party. In these two writings, Eco’s cutting-edge approach to the study of mass culture2 and its political implications emerge with powerful clarity. Despite its popular vocation, most Left-wing intellectuals ignored such cultural production and any methodology of cultural analysis other than Marxist theory. Instead, Eco demonstrated the political and theoretical relevance of mass culture and began to study it using structuralist methodologies. His ultimate purpose was to bring forth a “transformative attitude” in the cultural hemisphere of the Left:

By transformative attitude, I mean that cultural and critical attitude for which the destruction of what precedes and the proposal of new working hypotheses allow progressive criticism in continuity with the historical reality, thus making a transformative activity possible. For Leftist culture, or progressive culture, I mean one with a transformative attitude towards reality. (1963c: 26, my translation)

As we shall see extensively in the first part of this book, in so doing, Eco comes closer than most Italian Marxist intellectuals to Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on culture and the role of the intellectual. For Gramsci, intellectuals who are “organic” to the subaltern classes need to fully understand their culture to support their progress and emancipate them from the hegemony of the ruling class. Just as Gramsci approached the study of folklore and mass culture at large with no romantic and somewhat “orientalist” idealisation, Eco was convinced that the mechanics of mass culture should not be neglected:

The rise of mass media needs to be analysed and assessed from an ideological point of view in order to identify all the threats to culture, sensibility, and individual freedom that take place in this context. However, as a preliminary step, this analysis needs to consider the modes of communication of these means, the demands they meet, and the typical values that they actualise. (1963a: 24, my translation)

It should be emphasised that the context in which Eco put forward his thesis was, in his words, one that lacked “a positive anthropological analysis of the human in a mass society” and that “shall not overlook ideological judgements but not even be preceded by them” (p. 26). For Eco, Marxist thought was based on “a univocal and deterministic relation between the superstructure and the economic base” (1963b: 24). In his view, questions that were essential to the attainment of cultural, and thus political, change were being disregarded:

[Mass culture] meets the needs of the large masses. What are these needs? By which mechanisms are these met? Does it meet them or appear to meet them? Could they be met in a different way? If the structures of the society in which we live were profoundly changed, would they survive? In which form? (1963a: 26, my translation)

What was missing, however, was not only the necessary focus on these “new objects” but also suitable methodologies. Eco began to approach these questions with methodologies that he drew from structuralist semiology, before turning to interpretive semiotics in the wake of his encounter with the work of Charles Sanders Peirce.3 In other words, although aligned with the Leftist sphere, he rejected Marxist theory as the sole viable framework and sought to confront the challenges of mass society from within. Consequently, intellectuals affiliated with the Italian Communist Party characterised Eco’s ideas as “wheat ground in the positivistic mills that become flour for the bourgeois man” (Ferrata, 1963: 25, my translation) and “raised in the heart of a system of ideas and techniques that the modern capitalism solicits and absorbs” (Rossanda, 1963: 28).