h With a former Alpine soldier. With the parish priest. With Monsignor Loris Capovilla. With a former partisan. With a mountain guide. With a ski instructor. With the head forester. With the executive of an industrial design studio. With a worker. With an unemployed southerner.
Doesn’t understand. Remembers. Rediscovers.
Learns thanks to a vision of Pope John XXIII. Of the snow. Of the work site. Of solitude. Of friendship. Of silence.
m Goes away forever. n Thinking of nothing. With no purpose in life now. With a new purpose in life. Making a
novena to Pope John XXIII. Becoming a forester (mountain guide, tramp, miner, water bearer). Angry Young Directors’ Scenario
A young polio victim x of very rich Y parents sits in a wheelchairz in a villa n with a park full of gravel. k He hates his cousin, s an architect w and a radical, q and has sexual congresse with his own motherb in the missionary position, v then kills himselff after first playing chess a with the farm manager.i Variants Key
x Paraplegic. Compulsive hysteric. Simple neurotic. Revolted by the neocapitalistic society. Unable to forget an act of sexual abuse at the age of three by his grandfather. With a facial tic. Handsome but impotent. Blond and lame (and unhappy about it). Pretending to be crazy. Pretending to be sane. With a religious mania. Enrolled in the Marxist-Leninist Union but for neurotic reasons.
y Fairly well off. In decline. Diseased. Destroyed. Separated.
z On cul-de-jatte. On crutches. With a wooden leg. With false teeth. With long fangs on which he leans. Supports himself by leaning against trees.
n Yacht. Garden city. Sanatorium. Father’s private clinic.
k Another kind of paving, provided it makes a constant sound when a heavy vehicle arrives. s Other close relation, as desired, half brothers and in-laws admissible. Mother’s lover (or father’s, aunt’s, grandmother’s, farmer’s, fiancee’s).
w City planner. Writer. President of Save Venice. Stockbroker (successful). Left-wing political writer.
q Subscriber to the New York Review. Moderate Communist. Liberal professor. Former partisan leader. Member of WWF board. Friend of Theodorakis, Garry Wills, Jessica Mitford. Cousin of Berlinguer. Former leader of Student Movement.
e Tries to have sexual congress. Reveals impotence. Thinks of having sexual congress (dream sequence). Deflowers with bicycle pump. b Grandmother, aunt, father, sister, female second cousin, female first cousin, sister-in-law, brother. v From behind. Inserting a stick of dynamite into the vagina. With an ear of corn (must b preceded by casual Faulkner quotation from radical architect, see s-w). Cunnilingus. Beating her savagely. Wearing female dress. Dressing up to look like father (grandmother, aunt, mother, brother, cousin). Dressed as Fascist official. In U.S. Marine uniform. With plastic mask of Dracula. In SS uniform. In radical dress. In Scorpio Rising costume. In a Paco Rabanne tailleur. In prelate’s robes.
f Sprinkles himself with gasoline. Swallows sleeping pills. Doesn’t kill himself but thinks of killing himself (dream sequence). Kills her (him). Masturbates while singing «Love divine, all loves excelling.» Calls the suicide hot line. Blows up the post office. Urinates on the family tomb.
S.ets fire to photo of himself as a baby, with savage laughter. Sings «Mira Norma.»
a Chinese checkers. Toy soldiers. Hide-and-seek. Tag. Gin rummy. Slapjack. Racing demons. Fantan. Snap. Spin the bottle.
His aunt. Grandmother. Innocent little sister. Himself in the mirror. Dead mother (dream sequence). The postman on his rounds. The old housekeeper. Carmen Moravia. A Bellocchio brother (according to preference).
Luchino Visconti Scenario
The Baroness, a a Hanseatic b lesbian, betrays her male lover, c a worker at Fiat, d reporting him e to the police. f He dies g and she repents h and gives a big party, i orgiastic, 1 in the cellars of La Scala m with transvestites, n and there poisons herself.
Variants Key
a Duchess. Daughter of the Pharaoh. Marquise. Dupont stockholder. Middle European (male) composer. b From Munich. Sicilian. Papal aristocracy. From Pittsburgh.
c Her female lover-. Husband. Son with whom she has an incestuous relationship. Sister with whom she has an incestuous relationship. Lover of her daughter with whom she has an incestuous re lationship, though she betrays her daughter with her daughter’s male lover.
The Oberkomman danturweltanschaunggotterdammerungfiihrer of the SA of Upper Silesia. The catamite of her impotent and racist husband.
d A fisherman from the Tremiti Islands. Steelworker. Riverboat gambler. Mad doctor in a Nazi concentration camp. Commander of the Pharaoh’s light cavalry. Aide-de-camp of Marshal Radetzsky. Garibaldi’s lieutenant. Gondolier. e Giving him wrong directions about the route. Entrusting to him a bogus secret message. Summoning him to a cemetery on the night of Good Friday. Disguising him as Rigoletto’s daughter and putting him in a sack. Opening a trapdoor in the great hall of the ancestral castle while he is singing Manon dressed up as Marlene Dietrich.
f To Marshal Radetzsky. To the Pharaoh. To Tigellinus. To the Duke of Parma. To the Prince of Salina. To the Oberdeutscheskriminalinter
polphallusfiihrer of the SS of Pomerania. g Sings an aria from Aida. Sets off in a fishing smack to reach Malta and is never heard from again. Is beaten with iron bars during a wildcat strike. Is sodomized by a squadron of uhlans under the command of the Prince of Homburg. Becomes infected during sexual contact with .V anina V anini. Is sold as a slave to the Sultan and found again by the Borgia at the flea market of Portobello Road. Is used as a throw rug by the Pharaoh’s’ daughter.
h Is not the least repentant. Is wild with joy. Gone mad. Bathing at the Lido to the sound of balalaikas.
i A big funeral. A satanic rite. A Te Deum of thanksgiving.
l Mystical. Dramatic. Baroque. Algolagnical.
Scatological. Sadomasochistic.
m Pere-Lachaise. Hitler’s Bunker. In a castle in the Black Forest. In section 215 of the Fiat Mirafiori factory. At the Hotel des Bains on the Lido at Venice.
n With corrupt little boys. With German homosexuals. With the Trovatore chorus. With lesbians dressed as Napoleonic soldiers. With Cardinal Tisserant and Garibaldi. With Claudio Abbado. With Gustav Mahler.
o Attends the entire Ring cycle. Plays ancient songs of Burgundy on a Jew’s harp. Undresses at the climax of the party, revealing that she is really a man, then castrates herself. Dies of consumption, wrapped in Gobelin tapestries. Swallows liquid wax and is buried in the Musee Grevin. Has her throat cut by a lathe operator as she utters obscure prophecies. Waits for the acqua alta in St. Mark’s square and drowns herself.
1972
The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno
Translator’s note: Mike Bongiorno, smce the dawn of Italian television, has been a star, mainly as the quizmaster of programs based on-indeed, copied from-such American shows as «The $64, 000 Question» and «Wheel of Fortune.» But to call him a star gives an inadequate idea. Imagine someone with the popularity (but without the vitality) of Johnny Carson and the anonymity of Ed Sullivan, with a touch of Sesame Street’s Mr. Smiley. Even English-speaking readers who have never seen Italian TV will understand the type from Eco’s analysis.
The man seduced by the mass media becomes, of his peers, the most respected. He is never asked to be anything beyond what he already is. He is never encouraged to desire anything that does not .conform to his own tastes. Still, among the narcotic rewards granted him is escape into daydreams, so he is often confronted by goals which could create tension between them and him. He is, however, absolved of every responsibility, because these goals are deliberately. placed outside his reach. The tension is resolved in identification and not in actual transformations aimed at altering the status quo. In short, he is asked to be a man with a refrigerator and a twenty-one inch TV set: he is asked to remain as he is, in other words, merely adding, to the objects that he possesses, a refrigerator and a TV. In return he is offered role models like Kirk Douglas or Superman. The model of the mass-media consumer, on the other hand, is a superman that the consumer will never aspire to, though he enjoys identifying with that ideal in his imagination, as a person might put on someone else’s clothes for a moment before a mirror, without the slightest notion of ever owning those clothes.
But television puts the consumer in a new position. Td evision does not propose superman as an ideal with which to identify: it proposes everyman. Television’s ideal is the absolutely average person. In the theater Juliette Greco appears on the stage and immediately creates a myth and founds a cult; Josephine Baker prompts idolatrous rituals and gives her name to an era. In TV the magic face of Juliette Greco appears on various occasions, but the myth is never born; she is not the idol. The idol is the woman who announces her, and among women announcers the most beloved ancl famous will be the one who best embodies average characteristics: decent good looks, limited sex appeal, so-so taste, a certain housewifely inexpressiveness.
Now, in the realm of quantitative phenomena, the average represents in fact a median, and for those who have not achieved it, it also represents a goal.
According to the famous mot, statistics is the science according to which if one man eats two chickens daily and another man eats none, then each has eaten one chicken. In reality, for the man who hasn’t eaten the goal of one chicken a day, it is something to which he can aspire. But in the realm of qualitative phenomena, reducing to the median means reducing to zero. A man who possesses all the moral and intellectual virtues to an average
