Umberto Eco is a writer I have always held in high esteem (Foucault’s Pendulum anyone?) and as with such fellow writers as Luis Jorge Borges, I have always wondered how much time they had to have spent to gain such incredible erudition. This article from the Guardian answers my long standing question, but implies some other, deeper ones.
With regard to important and classic literature when is reading not enough? If you were to have read War and Peace when you were 15 years old…do you have the depth and maturity to really get it? What does this say for college freshmen…grinding through some literature survey class?
I quotes Italo Calvino last week, about the real effort it takes (demands and eventually rewards) to gain something real from reading a classic (for now we could define classic literature as a work which repays the effort to reread it).
Is it worth spending the time to reread Sophocles or Shakespeare many times instead of continuing through the cannons of class literature? The fact is that there really isn’t enough time to accomplish all that we might want regarding the acquisition of all of the potential erudition, and that Umberto Eco is not alone…
Umberto Eco: ‘I’m a writer not a reader’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/22/umberto-eco-writer-not-reader
In a new book on the future of literature, writers Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière confess to not being as well read as you might expect . . .
Umberto Eco: There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read. Who has actually read Finnegans Wake – I mean from beginning to end? Who has read the Bible properly, from Genesis to the Apocalypse?
And yet I’ve a fairly accurate notion of what I haven’t read. I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then. The Mahabharata – I’ve never read that, despite owning three editions in different languages. Who has actually read the Kama Sutra? And yet everyone talks about it, and some practice it too. So we can see that the world is full of books that we haven’t read, but that we know pretty well.
Jean-Claude Carrière: There are books on our shelves we haven’t read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life. The terrible grief of the dying as they realize their last hour is upon them and they still haven’t read Proust.
UE: When people ask whether I’ve read this or that book, I’ve found that a safe answer is, "You know, I don’t read, I write." That shuts them up. Although some of the questions come up time and time again: "Have you read Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair?" I ended up giving in and trying to read it, on three different occasions. But I found it terribly dull.
