Misreadings, Umberto Eco
Contents
Preface
Granita
Fragments
The Socratic Strip
Regretfully, We Are Returning Your…
Esquisse d’un nouveau chat
The Latest from Heaven
The Thing
Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society
The End Is at Hand
Letter to My Son
Three Eccentric Reviews
The Discovery of America
Make Your Own Movie
The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno
My Exagmination …
Music-hall, not poetry, is a criticism of life.
-James Joyce
Misreadings
Preface
In 1959, for fl Verri, a literary magazine whose contributors comprised many of the writers later to form the «Gruppo 63,» I began writing a monthly column entitled Diario minima, a title dictated as much by prudence as modesty. Into a pblication filled with linguistic experiments of the neo-avantgarde and impressive essays on Ezra Pound and Chinese ideograms, I was introducing pages of freewheelir,ig reflections on some minor subjects that, often, were meant to parody the writings of other contributors to the magazine, more zealous than I. So, right at the outset, I wanted to apologize to the readers for having written those pages, pages deliberately comic and grotesque, and therefore less dignified than the rest of the magazine.
The first texts, whether by me or by my friends, from the point of view of literary genre resembled the Mythologies of Roland Barthes. Barthes’ book had appeared in 1957, but at the time I began writing for Diario minima I was not yet acquainted with it.
MISREADINGS
Otherwise I would never have dared devote, in 1960, an essay to striptease. And, I believe, it was after reading Barthes that, out of humility, I abandoned the Mythologies style and moved on, gradually, to pastiche.
I had a further, deeper reason for adopting pastiche: If the work of the neo-avant-garde consisted in turning inside out the languages of daily life and of literature, the comic and the grotesque should be a part of that program. The tradition of pastiche which in France could boast such illustrious practitioners as.Proust, Queneau, and the Oulipo grouphad been generally less fortunate in Italian literature.
Hence the presence of Diario minima in the pages of fl Verri. Later, in 1963, when the pieces I had published in the magazine were collected in a volume, it was given the same title, even though the contents were not a diary in the accepted sense. That volume went through several editions, and now serves as the basis for this English-language version. Since a literal translation of the title, Minimal Diary, would be meaningless, I have preferred to call it Misreadings.
Parody, like all comic writing, is linked to space and time. The tragic stories of Oedipus and of Antigone move us still, but if we lack a knowledge of classic Athens, we will be baffled by many of the allusions in Aristophanes. I apologize for employing such eminent_ examples, but it is easier to make my point through them.
Though the contents of this volume represent a choice, and though a couple of the most «Italian» pieces have been omitted, I feel I owe the foreign reader a few words of explanation.
Explaining a joke inevitably kills its effect; but-si parva licet componere magnis-many of Panurge’s words remain incomprehensible without a footnote explaining· that his was the language of the Sorbonne.
«Granita» was meant as a parody of Nabokov’s Lolita, exploiting also the fact that the translation of the protagonist’s name is Umberto Umberto. Of course, my piece is not so much a parody of Nabokov as of the Italian translation of his novel; but what I wrote, even translated from Italian, is still readable, I think. The parody is set in the sll).all towns of Piedmont, the region where I was born.
In «Fragments,» obviously, I used the words of Italian popular songs, which in the translation have been replaced by American equivalents. In the final quotation, however, Shakespeare and Italian songs mix (in the original, instead of Shakespeare I used D’ Annunzio).
As my translator indicates in a prefatory note, Mike Bongiorno, while unknown to non-Italians, belongs to a familiar, international category; and, personally, I continue to consider him a genius.
Obviously «Esquisse d’un nouveau chat» refers to Alain Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman. As in other instances, the parody here is meant as a tribute.
«The Latest from Heaven» reports from the next world in terms of current political jargon. It was written several decades ago, but I think it will be comprehensible also in the age of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan.
The classics of Anglo-Saxon anthropology (Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Kroeber, etc.) were the inspiration for «Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society,» the title borrowed from a work by Malinowski. Its philosophical parts are enhanced by some quotations (suitably modified) from Husserl, Binswanger, Heidegger, and others. The Porta Ludovica paradox has become, in Italy, a set subject for study in the architecture departments of several universities.
In the same vein, «The End Is at Hand» is inspired by the social criticism of Adorno and the school of Frankfurt. Certain passages are indirect quotations from Italian authors who were given to «Adornizing» in those years. Like the piece that precedes it, this text is an exercise in what is called today «alternative anthropology» (not the world of others as seen by us, but our world as seen by others). Montesquieu already did this with Les Lettres Persanes. Some time ago, a group of anthropologists invited African researchers to France so that they could observe the French way of life. The Africans were amazed to find, for example, that the French were in the habit of walking their dogs.
The TV coverage of the first moon walk suggested «The Discovery of America.» In the original, the names of Italian anchormen were used; familiar American names have been substituted.
The title «My Exagmination . . .» repeats almost literally that of a famous collection of essays on Finnegans Wake. Bearing in mind all the critical styles in fashion at American universities a few decades ago (from New Criticism to various forms of symbolic cnttc1sm, and also a few hints at the criticism of Eliot), I adapted these attitudes of overinterpretation to the most famous Italian novel of the nineteenth century.
Most English-language readers will not be familiar with I promessi sposi (though an English translation exists, The Betrothed), but it should suffice to know that my Joycean reading is applied to a classic that dates from the early nineteenth century, its style and narrative structure recalling Walter Scott (for example) more than Joyce. Today I realize that many recent exercises in «deconstructive reading» read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody’s mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.
Umberto Eco
Granita
The present manuscript was given to me by the warden of the local jail in a small town in Piedmont. The unreliable information this man furnished us about the mysterious prisoner who left these papers behind in his cell, the obscurity that shrouds. the writer’s fate, a widespread, inexplicable reticence in all whose paths crossed that of the author of the following pages oblige us to be content with what we know; as we must be content with what is left of the manuscript-after the voracity of the prison ratssince we feel that even in these circumstances the reader can form a notion of the extraordinary tale of this Umberto Umberto (unless the mysterious prisoner is perhaps Vladimir Nabokov, paradoxically a refugee in the Langhe region, and the manuscript shows the other face of that protean immoralist) and thus finally can draw from these pages the hidden lesson: the libertine garb conceals a higher morality.
Granita. Flower of my adolescence, torment of my nights. Will I ever see you again? Granita. Granita.
Gran-i-ta. Three syllables, the second and third forming a diminutive, as if contradicting the first. Gran. Ita. Granita, may I remember you until your image has become a shadow and your abode the grave.
My name is Umberto Umberto. When the crucial event occurred, I was submitting boldly to the triumph of adolescence. According to those who knew me then, and not those who see me now, Reader, in this cell, haggard, with the first traces of a prophet’s beard stiffening my cheeks . . . according to those who knew me then, I was an ephebe of parts, with that hint of melancholy due, I believe, to the Mediterranean chromosomes of a Calabrian ancestor. The young girls I met desired me with all the violence of their burgeoning wombs, transferring me into the telluric anguish of their lonely nights. I scarcely remember those girls, as I myself was the horrible prey of quite another passion; my eyes barely grazed their cheeks gilded in the slanting sunset light by a silken, trans parent down.
I loved, dear Reader, dear friend! And with the folly of my eager years, I loved those whom you would call, in your sluggish thoughtlessness, «old women.» From the deepest labyrinth of my beardless being, I desired those creatures already marked by stern, implacable age, bent by the fatal rhythm of their eighty years, horribly undermined by the shadow of senescence. To denote those creatures ignored by the many, forgotten in the lubricious indifference of the customary usagers of sturdy Friulan milkmaids of twenty-five, I will employ, dear Reader-op-
pressed here again by the reflux of an intrusive knowledge that impedes, arrests any innocent act I might venture-a term that I do not despair of having chosen with precision: nornettes.
How can I describe, 0 you who judge me (toi, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!), the matutinal prey offered the crafty fancier of no’rnettes in this swamp of our buried world? How can I convey this to you,
