In this book of 15 short essays, all of which were originally published between 1959 and 1972, Umberto Eco deploys playful parodies and artful critiques that skewer his usual targets: the oversophisticated, overinterpreted, overacademic, and overintellectual cultural products and ideas formed in the wake of the postmodern turn, especially in the fields of literary theory, cultural criticism, and anthropology. As a whole, these experimental think-pieces can, and should, make your head spin. Some are outlandishly, laugh-out-loud funny, while others are virtually incomprehensible. Thankfully, there are more of the former than the latter.
While more cutting-edge within the context in which they were originally written, most of the essays still retain substantive resonance even decades after the fact. I have never been an Eco fan, mostly because he often writes in the exact ways he criticizes and supposedly deplores. Nevertheless, he rarely fails to be a good read, and I appreciate his parody of the ordinary, mundane, and even the grotesque. Indeed, Eco’s best pieces are exercises in alternative anthropology – “not the world of others as seen by us, but our world as seen by others” (p. 4). Thus, Eco’s intentionally misappropriated twists and turns swirl around familiar subjects creating, in the end, a seductive and entertaining pastiche.
Here are a few things that caught my attention:
“Granita” (1959), an inverted Lolita, and thus a parody of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, is a stroke of twisted genius in which the protagonist is in obsessive hot pursuit of a granny.
“Fragments” (1959) is a post-apocalyptic [yes, the nuclear Big One, friends – “the catastrophe of the year then known as 1980” (p. 15) – remember the Cold War, y’all?] conference paper delivered at the IV Intergalactic Congress of Archaeological Studies. Scholars, the archaeology professor reports, are trying to shed light on “the darkest mystery [that] has always enshrouded Italian pre-Explosion culture” (p. 19) by piecing together and interpreting fragmentary evidence from that obliterated civilization. And here’s the one I liked best:
While more cutting-edge within the context in which they were originally written, most of the essays still retain substantive resonance even decades after the fact. I have never been an Eco fan, mostly because he often writes in the exact ways he criticizes and supposedly deplores. Nevertheless, he rarely fails to be a good read, and I appreciate his parody of the ordinary, mundane, and even the grotesque. Indeed, Eco’s best pieces are exercises in alternative anthropology – “not the world of others as seen by us, but our world as seen by others” (p. 4). Thus, Eco’s intentionally misappropriated twists and turns swirl around familiar subjects creating, in the end, a seductive and entertaining pastiche.
Here are a few things that caught my attention:
“Granita” (1959), an inverted Lolita, and thus a parody of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, is a stroke of twisted genius in which the protagonist is in obsessive hot pursuit of a granny.
“Fragments” (1959) is a post-apocalyptic [yes, the nuclear Big One, friends – “the catastrophe of the year then known as 1980” (p. 15) – remember the Cold War, y’all?] conference paper delivered at the IV Intergalactic Congress of Archaeological Studies. Scholars, the archaeology professor reports, are trying to shed light on “the darkest mystery [that] has always enshrouded Italian pre-Explosion culture” (p. 19) by piecing together and interpreting fragmentary evidence from that obliterated civilization. And here’s the one I liked best:
“And we must remember how Italian science in that period had clearly made great progress in genetics, even though this knowledge was employed in racial eugenics, as we can infer from the lid of a box that must have contained a medicine for the improvement of the race, bearing only the words WHITER THAN WHITE accompanied by the letters AJAX (a reference to the first Aryan warrior)” (pgs. 19-20).
I would recommend that all academics find a way to cite “The Socratic Strip” (1960) in their work, especially since we all have fun with and thoroughly understand Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, etc…
In the hilarious “Regretfully, We Are Returning Your…: Readers’ Reports” (1972), manuscripts written by the likes of Cervantes, Dante, Diderot, Homer, Joyce, Kafka, Kant, and Proust are rejected by their publisher. Even The Bible is returned with the following critique: “But as I kept on reading, I realized that this is actually an anthology, involving several writers, with many – too many – stretches of poetry, and passages that are downright mawkish and boring, and jeremiads that make no sense” (p. 33). Best, and briefest, however, is the return of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake manuscript: “Please, tell the office manager to be more careful when he sends books out to be read. I’m the English-language reader, and you’ve sent me a book written in some other, godforsaken language. I am returning it under separate cover” (pgs. 45-46).
“The Thing” (1961) is yet another fine manifestation of various facets of Cold War culture – highly destructive weapons, a blind faith in and overreliance on scientific/technological expertise, pervasive militarism, and palpable anxiety and paranoia. It carries many of the same themes as would be seen only a few years later in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
It is commonplace for critics to review and critique books, works of art, and architecture, right? Well how about Italian money? As a cultural product it is certainly most deserving, and in the first of “Three Eccentric Reviews” (1967, 1968, and 1971), Eco casts a critical eye on the 1967-version of the Fifty Thousand Lire and One Hundred Thousand Lire notes, and it is superb.
Not to digress, but money is worth a closer look. Take, for example, the Indian rupee. There are 7 primary banknote denominations, each of a different color, and while the obverse of each has Gandhi’s image, the reverse of each has images of great significance to Indian culture (a tractor, a rhino/elephant/tiger, palm trees, the Indian Parliament, the Himalaya Mountains, etc.). Most strikingly, the language panel (reverse, left) includes the denomination in 15 languages, the most of any paper money in circulation. There is plenty of material here to “unpack” and “deconstruct.”
While television coverage of the Apollo spaceflights during the late-1960s originally inspired Eco’s version of “The Discovery of America” (1968), one can’t help but think of today’s 24/7/365 newscycle, and the constant coverage of events, especially the hyper-acceleration of that phenomenon during the last 20 years – from the Marines landing on the beaches of Mogadishu, Somalia, in December 1992 to the Iranian elections of June 2009.
Finally, in “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno” (1961), Eco falls prostrate at the altar of human mediocrity. Bongiorno, a still very much alive American-born Italian game-show host, embodies and epitomizes the finest characteristics of mediocrity:
A cross between Johnny Carson, Ed Sullivan, and Guy Smiley, Bongiorno is:
· “…not particularly good-looking, not athletic, courageous, or intelligent. Biologically speaking, he represents a modest level of adaptation to the environment” (p. 159).
· “…not ashamed of being ignorant and feels no need to educate himself” (p. 159).
· “…accepts all the myths of the society in which he lives” (p.160).
· “…rejects the idea that a question can have more than one answer. He regards all variants with suspicion” (p. 161).
· “… respects the opinion of others, not for any ideological reason but out of lack of interest” (p. 162).
· “…drives clichés to their extreme” (p. 162).
· “…a consolation to the mediocre” (p. 163).
· “…unaware of the tragic dimension of life” (p. 163).
· “…an ideal that nobody has to strive for, because everyone is already at its level” (p. 163).
I suppose I don’t mind such traits in a game-show host (…well, yes, I actually do mind…), but sadly I have studied presidents who have similar characteristics; some have carefully cultivated them, and even taken pride in them. Now that’s just dangerous.
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