In Umberto Eco’s Library of the World, he narrates his relationship with books, libraries, and physical media as a crucial feature of his own life and body. His entire life journey, from the collection of books he read as a child to his face as an honorary feature on newspapers after his death, the evolution of his writing and consumption of media follows cultural and personal changes he uniquely experienced. 

Evolution of Memory

Umberto starts the first section of the film discussing the origin of books. As they are descendants of living trees, they have something he calls “vegetal memory”. The counterparts of this concept are the “organic memory” that resides in human brains, and “mineral memory” from the silicone in digital devices. This concept of unsentient objects holding a very human concept of “memory” is one also brought up by Ingold, who states that all objects evidenced other lives, whether human, animal, or other, but in becoming objects, had broken off from these lives. Umberto describes libraries as “mankind’s common memory”. These physical collections hold information from generations ago, immortalizing history and bringing it to our current world in both its words and materiality. Umberto notes the importance of this memorialization for two main reasons. Firstly, as humans living in time, we cannot move forward without memory. This is an especially relevant concept within politics – as Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. As scholars and historians send out warning signals connecting current events to the rise of fascism and other devastating historical incidents, Umberto’s warning for the entirety of our human race becomes more and more urgent. Secondly, this archive of past intelligence does not provide benefit if there is no shared human memory. Umberto describes how through writing and reading books about others’ experiences, he also lived and thrived through them. This is the power he posits that libraries hold – the ability to spread once unique and inaccessible knowledge to whoever seeks it. Umberto argues that this sustainable and growing base of archives is constrained to physical media. Books, manuscripts, and drawings have already survived and prove to be useful after hundreds of years, whereas floppy disks and certain USBs are already incompatible and rendered obsolete just years after their release. This evolution of memory, from the journey of the very tree that created a book to the experiences poured into it by the now-deceased authors, display the need for a shared and universal place of information – which Umberto describes as libraries.

Culture and Storytelling

Umberto provides reassurance to the audience that he equally values popular forms of mass media and in-depth scholarly works. He describes how growing up, he gathered fulfillment by “stealing others’ stories” in the form of consuming books from philosophers and cheap novelists alike. Another uniquely human ability in media creation is the capacity to describe things that aren’t there in real life – otherwise known as telling stories. The capability to imagine, and create entire worlds other than the one we are living in is an amazing power that Umberto does not discount under the standards of book ratings or intellectual prestige. At the same time, he argues the contradiction that fiction supplies us with irrefutable truth. He brings up an interesting example of two people being able to argue forever about their respective religious beliefs, but being forced to agree upon the fact that Clark Kent is Superman. The simultaneous creation of stories and cultural standards connects back with Ingold’s critique of the hylomorphic model. Ingold argues that rather than seeing making as a combination of matter and form, it is an entire process of growth, and the maker acts as a participant in a world of active materials. Additionally, in the process of making, the maker joins forces with these worldly processes and merely adds his own intentions into them. In absorbing and using other stories as inspiration for writing his own, Umberto shapes the culture that he participates in, and his own works both shape and are shaped by the context around him.

Information Noise

Lastly, Umberto humbly acknowledges his own preference for physical media while objectively addressing the shortcomings of a digital information age. He describes that mass media overloads us with too much information than we can realistically process, creating noise that serves no effective purpose. He calls this a communication black out, which occurs with the lack of a shared library of common knowledge. Though the popularization of recording information leads to archives of knowledge that benefit generations to come, Umberto posits that if everything is recorded, we don’t feel the need to remember it. He describes how our memory first serves its purpose to preserve, but it then selects which pieces of information to keep in our minds over long periods of time. Within an era where we consume information in the form of 10-second videos and micro-essays from the moment we wake up to after we fall asleep, we don’t absorb or produce any valuable knowledge. Astutely, he predicts that we are entering an era of education where we learn not how to supply knowledge, but how to be selective with it. 

Relevance to Course:

Umberto’s focus on the tactile and material experience of creating and consuming books directly reinforces Ingold’s theories of making, and the idea of writing as a morphogenetic,  or form-generating, process. Both this theory and Umberto’s film softens the distinctions between organism and artefact. Cultural and mediated contexts prove that works are not always created by the form the maker has in mind, but rather by engagement with materials (or in Umberto’s case, information and knowledge). I would argue that Umberto uses books to mediate his body and the world. From his physical connection with touching and altering his books, it is clear that his library serves as an extension of himself. Wegenstein describes that new media splits the body and self into multiple agents, creating a multiwindowed experience through different forms of expression. However, despite his thorough engagement with an incredible variety of media creation, Umberto is able to carve his own place in various cultural contexts, from semiotics and philosophy to cartoons and mystery novels – demonstrating his unique interdisciplinary ability to create a sense of self through his writing.

Eco, U. (Director). (2015). Umberto Eco: The library of the world [Film]. Stefilm International.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.

Santayana, G. (1905). The life of reason: Or the phases of human progress. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Wegenstein, B. (2010). Body. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 19–33). University of Chicago Press.