Renewable Revolution

SNIPPET:

Eco talks about many other beautiful and very interesting things in the interview. His narrative is void of intellectual posturing – rather, it’s full of human humor, joy and curiosity. But the last part of the interview is especially interesting. Eco told the interviewer about his secret project that proved to be impossible:

Until the age of fifty and throughout all my youth, I dreamed of writing a book on the theory of comedy. Why? Because every book on the subject has been unsuccessful, at least all the ones I’ve been able to read.

Every theoretician of comedy, from Freud to Bergson, explains some aspect of the phenomenon, but not all. This phenomenon is so complex that no theory is, or has been thus far, able to explain it completely. So I thought to myself that I would want to write the real theory of comedy.

But then the task proved desperately difficult. If I knew exactly why it was so difficult, I would have the answer and I would be able to write the book.

Compared to beauty and ugliness, comedy is terrifying. I’m not talking about laughter, mind you. No, there is an uncanny sentimentality of the comic, which is so complex that—I cannot quite explain it. And this, alas, is why I didn’t write the book.

“Is comedy a specifically human invention, as you said lying is?” the interviewer asked.

“Yes, since it seems that animals are bereft of humor. We know that they have a sense of play, they feel sorry, they weep, they suffer. We have proof that they are happy, when they are playing with us, but not that they have comic feelings. It is a typical human experience, which consists of—no, I can’t exactly say.…

“I have a suspicion that it is linked with the fact that we are the only animals who know we must die," he said.


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Read the full article: Of Lying And Language — Last Thoughts On Umberto Eco
http://www.worldcrunch.com/rss/culture-society/of-lying-and-language-last-thoughts-on-umberto-eco/c3s20805/