A thoroughly modern medievalist

Eric Christiansen

FAITH IN FAKES by Umberto Eco (translated by Hugh Bredin)

Seeker & Warburg, £15

ART AND BEAUTY IN THE MIDDLE AGES By Umberto Eco (translated by Hugh Bredin)

Yale University Press, f6.95

WILLIAM MARSHALL by Georges Duby (translated by Richard Howard)

Faber & Faber, £9.95

Ican only think of three things wrong with Signor Eco, the celebrated penseroso of Milan, Bologna and Disneyland.

One is that he is a self-confessed 'semi- ologist'. A semiologist engages in semio- tics. Semiotics is the art of explaining the signs of the times, on the assumption that they are apt to be misleading. To cut a long story short (see page 11 of Faith), most of what we see and hear serves the interests of the Brobdignagian characters known as political power, economic power, enter- tainment, and the revolution industry. If the connexion is not immediately obvious, it can be deduced by these uncommonly clever chaps, the semiologists. Eco says there is no need to be frightened by this. Quite. But is there any tedium in the world like the tedium of a serious analysis of Disneyland as a reflection of American `sub-culture'?

The second charge is graver. In his preface, Eco declares that he is an academic who writes popular semiotic essays in the newspapers not for fun, but as a 'political duty'. It is part of his 'job as a citizen'. With the publisher's unerring pre- tentiousness, Seeker and Warburg put this confession on the dust-cover, under the author's picture: bearded, brachycephalic, quadrilateral specs, intelligent inclination of observant phiz, all 'messages' from the intellectual power-structure.

It would be a fine thing to invoke politics in this way, if it had not been done so very often by ladies and gentlemen trying to dignify their own addiction to doing things badly. Bad writing, bad music, bad architecture, bad pictures, bad films, bad behaviour, bad language, bad jokes, and in one case known to me, bad food, have all come swaggering into the world under this banner. To claim political duty as an excuse for what, in this case, is the skillful exercise of a God-given talent is to invite disbelief as inevitably as the old plea: I was only obeying orders.

The third article of impeachment con- cerns the work that made Eco world- famous, the detective story set in the 14th century which he called The Name of the Rose. I think I speak for all medievalists when I allow that to concoct from those two antique forms of pedantry, the whodu- nit and the history of ideas, a single fiction stuffed with lecture-notes and recondite clues was only a minor literary misde- meanour. But for this work to become a best-seller, possibly even a block-buster, was quite unforgiveable: an affront to all of us who have been putting ourselves to sleep with detective-stories and our pupils to sleep with medieval history for decades, and never suspected that we were all sleeping on a gold-mine. Grrrr.

On the other hand, there is much to be said in favour of the man.

He is a perfectly respectable medievalist, who can, if he chooses, be as soporific as the rest of them. Readers of Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages will find many interesting observations on medieval aes- thetics, written 30 years ago by a young scholar who now admits that he 'believed that a tortured syntax was a respectable symptom of wisdom and maturity.' It is not so much the syntax, as statements like `Woman had been ignored during Feudal- ism' and 'In the world of the cathedrals there had been no place for anguish and puzzlement' which ought to have been sorted out before the book was reprinted in translation. However, it was intended as a single chapter in a large general history of aesthetics, and such compendiums are bound to be full of hot air. They are not often as useful as this one.

Anyway, that was a long time ago, before Eco took to semiotics, journalism and detective fiction. Faith in Fakes is a collection of the journalism, in which, like scores of other columnists, he tries to make sense and occasional fun, of the mad world of the Seventies and Eighties.

On the whole he strikes me as penseroso rather than allegro, because it is uphill work preaching sanity where politics, opera, and crime appear to be more closely connected than over here. Italian intellec- tuals have been known to align themselves with every form of political thuggery, from the risorgimento onwards, as if any kind of nonsense were preferable to impotence. They only allow themselves to laugh at the church; not so often at the comical ideolo- gies which come floating in from Paris, London and Moscow.

Eco is not like that, despite the semiolo- gy and the politics. He puts not his faith in fakes, if he can help it. He has no time for Red Brigadiers. 'Their antiquated fantasy of world revolution would be laughable if this novel weren't written in blood.' So it isn't laughable; merely contemptible. The squalid ideal of 'purification through blood' must never be confused with hero- ism, because heroism means suffering 'in order to lessen the tribute of blood, never to increase it.' And so say all of us. But is this going to melt the resolve of an IRA supporter? Presumably not. As with so much intelligent political journalism, the audience seems to be thin, and rather well-dressed. The perils of nihilism — Hampstead has been warned. In Italy, however, where millions of respectable people have voted for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the expropriation of the expropriators, the warning has more gravity.

Eco wages his campaign against cults, ideologies and mass-illusions with the pa- tient and rather knowing air of one who has read the book, seen the film, and the re-make, and disliked all of them. In answer to McLuhan's deification of the mass media he proposes a more, not a less critical appreciation of the message. The Crisis of Reason? 'I still don't understand what the hell it means. I cross the street on a red light, the cop blows his whistle, and then fines me (not someone else).' As for Barthes, and his immortal statement that language is 'neither reactionary nor prog- ressive, but quite simply fascist' (because it compels us to use formulae and stereotypes) he points out 'you can cheat. This dishonest and healthy and liberating trick is called Literature.' Literature plays with words, rather than just accepting them. In any case 'if the human condition is placed under the sign of fascism, all are fascists and no-one is a fascist any longer.'

He hates football. He has not allowed himself to be ravished by the USA. He does not believe that Donald Duck is great literature. But what does he like? Among other things, the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. If such a thinker could exist to-day, he would bring order to our intellectual chaos. He would 'come to terms with Marxism, with the physics of relativity, with formal logic, with existen- tialism and phenomenology', and he would make 'not a definitive system' of philoso- phy, but a 'sort of mobile system, a loose-leaf summa' which would enable us to 'think new things'. Perhaps, but it sounds as if Eco expects to get to the moon on a telescope. Why should clear thinking be any more influential in the 20th than in the 13th century?

In another context, he insists that the history of thought and the history of action are not the same. One example of this confusion, he suggests, is Georges Duby's The Three Orders, a study of the medieval concept of a three-part society (workers- fighters-clerks), and how this concept meant different things at different times. Such schemes of how society should be seen, and Duby's notion of how society was, march together hand-in-hand in a very comradely fashion throughout the book, which Eco found 'dense, fascinating and boring at the same time'. In Duby's Middle Ages 'the play of forces risks disappearing in the face of the dominant argument, which is made up by the con- stant rearrangement of symbolic figures.'

Fair enough, and Eco is an expert at identifying bogus conceptions of the Mid- dle Ages: he lists ten in one of his essays, excluding Duby's. Symbolic figures are the weakness of this learned Gaul, and in William Marshal he has selected a particu- larily ripe example.

This tough and canny fighting man was recognized as the best of his breed even in his own lifetime, which spanned the 70-odd years between King Stephen and King Henry III. When at last he died, his heir commissioned a poem in his honour, and the poem records at length the career of chivalry which thousands of mailed horse- men dreamed of in their damp straw- bedded dormitories, but failed to achieve. By hard hitting, in war and tournaments, the marshal won money, fame, power, and the hand of a great heiress. In 1217 he won the Battle of LinColn for the infant Henry III, and saved England from becoming a dependency of the French king. He died in the most ceremonious and honourable manner, emitting all the 'signals', 'mes- sages' and 'symbols' which a thoroughly modern medievalist could expect.

These were still fresh in the mind of his biographer when he wrote them down in rhyme, and now Duby re-tells the stirring tale with (for him) a moderate dressing of sociological mayonnaise to make it go down nicely with a modern French audi- ence. It is really quite enjoyable. A pity the translator doesn't known the difference between 'barony' and 'baronage', but the good things come through intact.

I don't agree with the author's conclu- sion that William Marshal was the last of his kind, the end of an era.

They always say that. But a hundred years after the marshal died, there were noisy little boys who would grow rich and famous by their fighting skills, rub shoul- ders with great nobles and kings on the field of battle and in the lists, and end up knights of the garter with heiresses and domains of their own: Edward III had an eye for such men. The old order changeth', no doubt: but not quite as rapidly as Duby would have us believe.