Page 215 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

to recompose 10 different novels is stupid; as stupid as and composing, but they have nothing to do, according to
Dungeons and Dragons or this kind of stuff. It can be a me, with the future of literature.
game. But maybe I am a dinosaur: I am still living very well by
Once a man called Saporta invented in France, at the selling old-fashioned books, and probably I’ll die before
end of the fifties, a moveable book. The idea was already the landscape has changed completely. So I remain open
present in Mallarmé. The idea of the moveable book was to possible developments of all these perspectives. At
a sort of great metaphor for the infinity of reading. If you the present state of the art, if I had to bet all the money
want, it was a metaphor for deconstruction. OK. Saporta, I have in my pocket, I would bet more on hyper-systems
on the contrary, made a book in which you could mix... more than on hypertext. That’s a personal bet.
“You mean you could put things into it?” “Have you looked at any of these hyper-books, like those
...mix up the pages, and the story would change. of Jay Bolter and Michael Joyce? They have made some
“A kind of loose-leaf book?” of these things which are just basically a hypertext
Yes. OK. If you suspect that even in a CD-ROM the links system, where you can go in, and there’s a lot of text
are pre-established by the author, well, even which you can explore by means of different links.”
Saporta pre-established the possibilities of the story. Yes, I have read about them... I have not tried them, and I
“It’s all a limited universe, yes.” know that my position can be the same as of Cremonini,
Is it not better to read Shakespeare and then to who was a great professor of logic, metaphysics and
daydream, dreaming of Hamlet marrying Juliet, and so astronomy at the time of Gallileo. When they brought to
the hypertext as a text can only be a game. The hyper-
system, that is the future. The hypertext can have
educational purposes: try to mix up things, to find new
possibilities. OK, but it is not a revolution in literature or
in poetry.
“You don’t think so?”
No, I don’t think so. When you have had what we had the
paper books, and with Joyce or Mallarmé, you don’t need
the hypertext in order to have an open-ended reading of
literature.
“You mentioned Dungeons and Dragons. These multi-user
virtual spaces where people can engage simultaneously
in dialogue by writing. They can create rooms, they
can assume character roles, they can interact with
UMBERTO ECO IN CONVERSATION WITH PETRU RUSSU BRIEFING ON MY
each other in ways that physical space cannot allow. A FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM '89 EXHIBITION, INSPIRED BY ECO’S SECOND NOVEL
colleague of mine, Finn Bostad, told me that some of FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM, WRITTEN IN 1988 AND PUBLISHED IN 1989. PICTURE
CREDIT: © MARTA DIMITRESCU
his students spend many hours in this environment. For
some, it is like enacting a novel at the same time as you
are writing it.” him Gallileo’s binocular, he said “I do not want to look
OK, it’s a nice game. inside it, because it could mix up my ideas.”
“Do you think this might lead to new forms of literature?” So the poor Cremonini remained as the symbol of
I have been using a fantastic hypertext for the last 30 academic bigot that refuses to try a new experience.
years. It is called Scrabble. Isn’t it true that with Scrabble Then, when you read a serious book on Cremonini,
you can compose every possible cross-link, every first you discover that Cremonini was a great mind of
combination of sentences. It’s a nice game, it can have this time, even though he was not an innovator like
educational purposes. Sometimes my wife who is German Gallileo, and that it isn’t true that he refused to look
learned part of her English lexicon by playing Scrabble. into the binocular. He just said: “At the present state of
Sometimes we play Scrabble in English, or in French. OK, technology, those lenses are very rudimentary, so I don’t
but if you are a poet you have your mental Scrabble. You think that they can really help me to see something more.
don’t need the board to do it. It is the same I think for all It was an objection to the present primitive state of the
those kinds of games. They can be very nice to play. So, I art. So what I am making now is probably a statement
repeat: they can be used for training people in inventing that we are still at a primitive state of the art. I have not

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