REPLY TO DONALD PHILLIP VERENE

I am glad that various, nonsystematic observations of mine on the comic have allowed Verene this fine panoramic view of the theories of the comic. Obviously Verene is vastly competent when it comes to Vico, and his reconstruction of Vico’s thinking on the comic represents a fundamental contribution to this volume. Likewise, I was enlightened and convinced by his recognition of Hegel’s humor, and I willingly admit that my old definition of Hegel (moreover incidental and parenthetic) as a “philosopher who was just as austere, boring, and not at all inclined to joke” was probably the result of a momentary bout of ill humor. I also admit that even though I have read Hegel on a few occasions (see, for example, the chapter “Form as Social Commitment” in The Open Work, where I deal with his concept of alienation or Entfremdung), Hegel never really influenced me and probably I let his humor fade away on a night in which all cows were black.

But let’s get to the fact that Verene has discovered many of my observations on the comic both in my fiction and in my essays, but without being able to identify a System of the Comic on my part. Such a system was the dream of a good part of my life. As I have said in my autobiography, I was always left dissatisfied by the fact that the most famous theorists of the comic from Bergson or Freud to Pirandello (who dealt more specifically with humor) have told us many things about this phenomenon, but not all. Aristotle can be added to this list. I dealt with the comic in an essay on Pirandello, which Verene cites, and in “The Comic and the Rule” (now in Travels in Hyperreality), previously published in another form as “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom’” in Carnival! (1984); but that was a contribution to a symposium, and not a systematic work. It is no accident, after having tried to trace the boundaries between varieties of the comic (humor, comedy, grotesque, parody, satire, wit, and so on), that I concluded: “Perhaps I am confusing categories that must be further distinguished. In reflecting on this fact . . . I am perhaps opening the door, just a crack, onto a new genre, the humorous reflection on the mechanism of symposia, where one is asked to reveal in thirty minutes what is le propre de l’homme” (with an obvious reference to the definition of laughter by Rabelais).¹

Consequently, I waited a long time for the book, which I would have wanted to write, on the comic. At a certain point I gave up and decided (with comical resolution) not to write it in expectation that after my death there would appear several doctoral dissertations on what that unwritten work of mine would have been like. (Verene, if he has nothing better to do, would make an excellent candidate for that undertaking. . .)

On the other hand, in my essay on Pirandello, I had ventured to suggest that Aristotle had come across a similar problem: “As a thinker, Aristotle was lucid enough to decide to lose a text in which he had not succeeded in being as lucid as he usually was.”² Then as a writer of fiction, I wrote a novel (The Name of the Rose) on Aristotle’s lost work, which should have told us about the comic and laughter. In so doing perhaps I outlined various aspects of the book I never wrote.

What is more, I have also written parodies and ironical inversions of the theoretical and critical practices of others (see Misreadings, 1993).³ I made little mention of this in my autobiography because I felt they were literary divertissements without any philosophical intentions. But after reading Verene I fully realize that even there I had outlined a few philosophical ideas on the function of the comic, and in particular on the critical mission of parody. In various texts I parodied Nabokov’s style and turned the story of Lolita on its head, and wrote about a young character who could love only octogenarian ladies; I imagined how a vanished earthly civilization might have been reconstructed by aliens who had managed to salvage from the ruins of our planet only a little book of really trashy pop songs (in which they evidently found profound considerations on life and death); I parodied the style of the nouveau roman or researches in cultural anthropology (describing a Polynesian academic examining with ethnocentric amazement the primitive civilization of Milan), using the methods of Margaret Mead but also the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger; I pessimistically reinterpreted the situation of Pericles’s Greece as if it were critiqued by Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno; and finally in the essay “My exagmination round his factification for incamination to reduplication with ridecolation of a portrait of the artist as Alessandro Manzoni,” I examined Manzoni’s The Betrothed (a classic that dates from the early nineteenth century, in style and narrative structure more like Walter Scott, for example, than Joyce) as if it had been the last work by the Irish writer after Finnegans Wake.⁴ Obviously I parodied a lot of Anglo-American criticism and, in presenting these writings, I concluded: “Today I realize that many recent exercises in ‘deconstructive reading’ read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody’s mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.”⁵

Now, on reading Verene, I realize that in playing that way I was performing a sort of pre- (or post-) philosophical game, in order to show “how much the being of anything is tied to what it is not, which offers us the beginning of self-knowledge” (Verene). It is no accident that by way of an exergue to my Misreadings I put a quotation from Joyce: “Music-hall, not poetry, is a criticism of life.”

But this is obviously true only if you take it as a joke.

U.E.

NOTES

  1. Umberto Eco, “The Comic and the Rule,” in Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 278. [Ed.]

  2. Umberto Eco, “Pirandello Ridens,” in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 164. [Ed.]

  3. Umberto Eco, Misreadings, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993). [Ed.]

  4. Umberto Eco, “My Exagmination . . .” in Misreadings. [Ed.]

  5. Eco, Misreadings, 5. [Ed.]