The most striking illustration of superman’s being reduced to everyman is, in Italy, the figure of Mike Bongiorno and the history of his fame. Idolized by millions of people, this man owes his success to the fact that from every act, from every word of the persona that he presents to the telecameras there emanates an absolute mediocrity along with (the only virtue he possesses to a high degree) an immediate and spontaneous allure, which is explicable by the fact that he betrays no sign of theatrical artifice or pretense. He seems to be selling himself as precisely what he is, and what he is cannot create in a spectator, even the most ignorant, any sense of inferiority. Indeed, the spectator sees his own limitations glorified and supported by national authority.
To understand the extraordinary power of Mike Bongiorno it is necessary to conduct an analysis of his behavior, an authentc «Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno,» in which, of course, his name stands not for the real man but for the public figure.
Mike Bongiorno is not particularly good-looking, not athletic, courageous, or intelligent. Biologically speaking, he represents a modest level of adaptation to the environment. The hysterical love he arouses in teenage girls must be attributed partly to the
maternal feelings he arouses in a female adolescent, and partly to the glimpse he allows her of an ideal lover, meek and vulnerable, gentle and considerate.
Mike Bongiorno is not ashamed of being ignorant and feels no need to educate himself. He comes into contact with the most dazzling areas of knowledge and remains virgin, intact, a consolation to others in
their natural tendencies to apathy and mental sloth. He takes great care not to awe the spectator, demonstrating not only his lack of knowledge but also his firm determination to learn nothing.
On the other hand, Mike Bongiorno displays a sincere and primitive admiration for those who do know things. He emphasizes, however, their physical qualities, their dogged application, their power of
memory, their obvious, elementary methodology. A man becomes cultivated by reading many books and retaining what they say. Mike Bongiorno hasn’t the slightest inkling that culture has a critical and creative function. For him, its only criterion is quantitative. In this sense (having to read many books in order to be cultured), the man with no natural gifts in that direction simply renounces the attempt.
Mike Bongiorno professes a boundless faith in the expert. A professor is a man of learning, a represen
tative of official culture; he is the technician in the field. The question goes to him, to his authority.
But true admiration of culture is found only when, through culture, money is earned. Then culture proves to be of some use. The mediocre man refuses to learn, but he decides to make his son study.
Mike Bongiorno’s notion of money and its value is petit bourgeois: «You’ve now won a hundred thousand lire! A tidy sum, eh?»
Mike Bongiorno thus expresses to the contestant the merciless reflections that the viewers will be making at home: «You must be very happy with all this money, considering the monthly salary you earn. Have you ever put your hands on so much money before?»
Like children, Mike Bongiorno thinks of people in categories and addresses them with comic deference (the child says, «Excuse me, Mr. Policeman . . .), always using, however, the most common and vulgar category: «Mr. Garbage Collector,» «Mr.
Sharecropper.»
Mike Bongiorno accepts all the myths of the society in which he lives. When Signora Balbiano d’ Aramengo appears as a contestant, he kisses her hand, saying that he is doing this because she is a countess (sic).
With society’s myths he accepts also society’s conventions. He is paternal and condescending with the humble, deferential with the socially distinguished.
Handing out money, he instinctively thinks, without explicitly saying so, more in terms of alms than of deserved rewards. He indicates his belief that in the dialectic of the classes the one route of upward mobility is represented by Providence (which, on occasion, can assume the guise of Television).
Mike Bongiorno speaks a basic Italian. His speech achieves the maximum of simplicity. He abolishes the subjunctive, and subordinate clauses; he manages to make syntax almost invisible. He shuns pronouns, repeating always the whole subject. He employs an unusually large number of full stops. He never ventures into parentheses, does not use elliptical expressions or allusions. His only metaphors are those that now belong to the commonplace lexicon. His language is strictly referential and would delight a neopositivist. No effort is required in order to understand him. Any viewer senses that he himself, if called upon, could be more talkative than Mike Bongiorno.
Mike Bongiorno rejects the idea that a question can have more than one answer. He regards all variants with suspicion. Nabucco and Nabuccodonosor are not the same thing. Confronted by data, he reacts like a computer, firmly convinced that A equals A and tertium non datur. An inadvertent Aristotelian, he is consequently a conservative pedagogue, paternalistic, reactionary.
Mike Bongiorno has no sense of humor. He laughs because he is happy with reality, not because he is capable of distorting reality. The nature of paradoxeludes him; if someone uses a paradox in speaking to him, he repeats it with an amused look and shakes his head, implying that his interlocutor is pleasantly eccentric. He refuses to suspect that behind the paradox a truth is concealed, and in any case he does not consider paradox an authorized vehicle of expression.
He avoids polemics, even in admissible fields. He does not lack for information on the oddities of the knowable (a new school of painting, an abstruse discipline . . . «Tell me now, I hear all this talk about Cubism. Just what is Cubism exactly?»). Having received the explanation, he does not try to delve any deeper, but indicates, on the contrary, his polite dissent, as a sensible, right-thinking citizen. Still, he respects the opinion of others, not for any ideological reason but out of lack of interest.
From all the possible questions on a subject, he chooses the one that would first come to anybody’s mind and that half the viewers would immediately reject as too banal: «What is this picture about?» «What made you pick a hobby so different from your regular job?» «What got you interested in philosophy?»
He drives cliches to their extreme. A girl educated by nuns is virtuous; a girl with brightly colored stockings and a ponytail is a «hippy.» He asks the former if she, a nice girl, would like to look like the latter; when he is told that the question is insulting, he consoles the second girl, praising her physical superiority and humiliating the convent-school product. In this dizzying whirl of faux pas he doesn’t even try to paraphrase, for paraphrase is already a form of wit, and wit belongs to a Vico cycle alien to Bongiorno. For him, everything has one name and only one; any rhetorical figure is a fraud. In the final analysis, a faux pas stems always from an act of unintentional sincerity; when the sincerity is deliberate, what results is not a faux pas but a challenge, a provocation. The faux pas (of which Bongiorno is a past master, according to critics and audience) arises precisely when the speaker is sincere by mistake, out of thoughtlessness. The more mediocre a man is, the clumsier he is. Mike Bongiorno is a consolation to the mediocre, for he exalts the faux pas, raising it to the dignity of rhetoric, of an etiquette established by the TV company and by the viewing nation.
Mike Bongiorno sincerely rejoices with the victor, because he honors success. Politely uninterested in the loser, he is moved if the latter is in desperate straits, and he may promote some beneficent action, at the conclusion of which he expresses his satisfaction and convinces the audience of his pleasure; then he moves on to other concerns, content with the fact that this is the best of all possible worlds. He is unaware of the tragic dimension of life.
Mike Bongiorno therefore convinces the public, by his living and triumphant example, of the value of mediocrity. He provokes no inferiority complexes, though he presents himself as an idol; and the public repays him, gratefully, with its love. He is an ideal that nobody has to strive for, because everyone is already at its level. No religion has ever been so indulgent to its faithful. In him the tension between what is and what should be is annulled. He says to his worshipers, «You are God, stay exactly as you are»
1961
My Exagmination
Round His Factification for Incamination to Reduplication with Ridecolation of a Portrait of the Artist as Alessandro Manzoni
The reviewer cannot conceal his satisfaction in speaking about this little volume from the pen of Mr. James Joyce, now printed for the first time by Shakespeare & Co., revived by Miss Beach solely to permit this literary event, which I suspect will be hailed as by far the most important of the year. While we must be grateful to Miss Beach for giving us back, not without sacrifice on her part, her estimable publishing house of the twenties, we owe an even deeper gratitude to Richard Ellmann and his collaborators, who after years of unceasing study of manuscripts preserved at the University of Buffalo have succeeded in collating this work
