At the height of Umberto Eco’s popularity, it may have been tempting to dismiss the Italian scholar and novelist as too representative of his own time, a purveyor of entertainments for hip intellectuals with a poststructuralist bent. His obsessions with semiotics and fakes, conspiracy theories and heretical Christian sects of the late Middle Ages, seemed quirky, meta, and all in good fun. But in the years since his death in 2016, they’ve turned out to be uncannily prescient, as Davide Ferrario’s Umberto Eco: A Library of the World aims to prove.
This biographical documentary isn’t a peek behind the curtain into a public intellectual’s private life. Rather, it’s a reframing of the preoccupations of a thinker who’s no longer very fashionable. In the process, it becomes a timely epistemological rumination on the difference between knowledge and information, the relationship between memory and technology.
In archival footage of a TV interview, Eco refers to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious,” whose protagonist remembers everything that he’s ever perceived, every leaf of every tree and every thought to ever pass through his mind, including memories of memories. As the narrator of the story speculates, Funes is so overloaded with details that he’s lost the ability to think—in other words, to generalize, to imagine, to distinguish. For Eco, Funes’s memory has turned out to be an image of the internet with its vast swaths of information.
With infinite information instantly accessible via what Eco calls the “mineral memory” stored in silicon, we rely less and less on the “organic memory” stored in our brains, and the “vegetal memory” stored in books. How can we filter, select, and structure so much information? How can we differentiate fact from fiction, misinformation from information, silence from noise? Eco asks hard questions, then admits to a “sentimental” preference for vegetal memory, and the film includes numerous interviews in which he warns against the decay of our collective memory and, as a consequence, our ability to communicate with one another.
As Eco claims, all “criminal” governments depend on fabricated sources and “programmed misinformation” to distract us from reality. He’s referring specifically to fascism, though the argument can easily be extended to include any state with more or less sophisticated methods of curating information. As we have already seen, the internet offers politicians of every stripe an unprecedented means of dissemination, or of simply swamping us with content.
As an artefact of mineral memory itself, A Library of the World engages in a gentle polemic with its subject. It’s an eclectic, free-associative assemblage of archival footage of Eco, interviews with family members, explorations of Eco’s personal library of over 30,000 volumes and other libraries across the world, dramatic monologues of Eco’s writing, even an animated sequence made to look like the arcane diagrams of the 16th-century philosopher Robertus de Fluctibus.
The monologues use mirrors, negative space, and Eco’s labyrinthine library to convey the playful complexities of his words. Similarly, montage sequences in which the camera zooms and pans across the esoteric books in the library recall the approach to filming artworks in John Berger’s TV series Ways of Seeing, taking advantage of technological reproduction to present these images in a way otherwise impossible. As such, Ferrario suggests that the interplay between the three categories of memory—as opposed to backing one and declaring the others dead—may yet be a vehicle for further development of human consciousness.
A Library of the World does a fine job of demonstrating how Eco’s ideas are relevant to contemporary predicaments—the explosive proliferation of conspiracy theories, the rise of populist authoritarians in democratic guise, and the congelation of online discourse into mutually-exclusive, self-congratulatory dogmas—but it doesn’t offer any solutions. That said, it memorializes Eco the thinker, and urges us to reacquaint ourselves with his writings directly, to seek out the deadly serious implications that always underlie his literary games.
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