CityReads│May You Find Your Own Abbot Vallet

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May You Find Your Own Abbot Vallet in Reading & Writing

In "How to Write a Thesis", Umberto Eco walks students through the craft and value of doing research.

Umberto Eco, translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina, 2015. How to Write a Thesis, MIT Press.

（意）翁贝托·埃科著，高俊方[等]译，大学生如何写毕业论文，华龄出版社，2003

Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis

Umberto Eco was an Italian semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is the author of The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and The Prague Cemetery, all bestsellers in many languages, as well as a number of influential scholarly works.

By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy’s most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis, in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis—from choosing a topic to organizing a work schedule to writing the final draft. Now in its twenty-third edition in Italy and translated into seventeen languages, How to Write a Thesis has become a classic. Remarkably, this is its first, long overdue publication in English.

In this book, Eco teaches one how to work independently, not how and where to find, as Italians say, the prepared meal. Eco advises students how to avoid “thesis neurosis” and he answers the important question “Must You Read Books?” He reminds students “You are not Proust” and “Write everything that comes into your head, but only in the first draft.” Of course, there was no Internet in 1977, but Eco’s index card research system offers important lessons about critical thinking and information curating for students of today who may be burdened by Big Data.

Eco’s approach is anything but dry and academic. How to Write a Thesis is unlike any other writing manual. It reads like a novel. It is opinionated. It is frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious. For example, Eco warned against the dishonesty, “What you should never do is quote from an indirect source pretending that you have read the original. This is not just a matter of professional ethics. Imagine if someone asked how you were able to read a certain manuscript directly, when it is common knowledge that it was destroyed in 1944!” More examples, “First, writing a thesis should be fun. Second, writing a thesis is like cooking a pig: nothing goes to waste”.  “Your thesis is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget. In the end, it will represent your first serious and rigorous academic work, and this is no small thing”.

Abbot Vallet and academic humility

In the section 4.2.4 on the topic of “Academic Humility,” Eco attempted to show that the best ideas do not always come from major authors, and that no intellectual contribution should be shunned because of the author’s status. As an example, Eco recounted the writing of his own laurea thesis, during which he found a decisive idea that resolved a thorny theoretical problem, in a small book of little originality written in 1887 by a certain abbot Vallet, a book that he found by chance in a market stall in Paris.

The book is titled  L’idée du Beau dansm la philosophie de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (The idea of beauty in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas), which attracted Eco at first for its beautiful binding. When Eco started to read the book, he realized that the abbot Vallet was a poor fellow who repeated preconceived ideas and did not discover anything new. But Eco continued reading, and at a certain point—almost in parentheses, said probably unintentionally, the abbot not realizing his statement’s significance—Eco found a reference to the theory of judgment linked to that of beauty. It was an Eureka moment for Eco. Eco had found the key, provided by the poor abbot Vallet, who had died a hundred years before, who was long since forgotten, and yet who still had something to teach to someone willing to listen. Thus Eco drew a lesson from this experience, which he called academic humility: the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.

Beniamino Placido wrote a charming review in La Repubblica (September 22, 1977). Placido implied that Eco had invented the abbot Vallet to tell the fairy tale. When Eco met Placido, Eco told him:

“You are wrong; the abbot Vallet exists, or rather he existed, and I still have his book at home. It has been more than twenty years since I have opened it, but since I have a good visual memory, to this day I remember the page on which I found that idea, and the red exclamation point that I wrote in the margin. Come to my home and I will show you the infamous book of the abbot Vallet.”

No sooner said than done: they went to Eco’s home, and poured themselves two glasses of whiskey. Eco climbed a small ladder to reach the high shelf where the fated book had rested for twenty years. Eco found it, dusted it, opened it once again with a certain trepidation, looked for the equally fated page, with its beautiful exclamation point in the margin. 

Eco showed the page to Placido, and then Eco read him the excerpt. Eco read it, and read it again, and he was astonished. The abbot Vallet had never formulated the idea that Eco attributed to him; that is to say he had never made the connection between the theory of judgment and the theory of beauty. Vallet wrote of something else. Stimulated in some mysterious way by what he was saying, Eco made that connection himself and, and as he identified the idea with the text I was underlining, Eco attributed it to Vallet.

But Eco insisted the importance of Vallet. “Had I never read Vallet, I would never have had that idea. He may not have been the father of that idea, but he certainly was, so to speak, its obstetrician. He did not gift me with anything, but he kept my mind in shape, and he somehow stimulated my thinking. Is this not also what we ask from a teacher, to provoke us to invent ideas?”

Eco believed the meaning of this story is that research is a mysterious adventure that inspires passion and holds many surprises. Not just an individual but also an entire culture participates, as ideas sometimes travel freely, migrate, disappear, and reappear.
 
This is why Eco introduced Abbot Vallet as a main character in his novel The Name of the Rose. Vallet first appears in the second line of the introduction, this time as a literal (yet still mysterious and magical) donor of a lost manuscript, and a symbol of a library in which books speak among themselves.
 
I wish readers to find your own abbots Vallet over the course of your lives.

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