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, who course through afternoon gardens in banal pursuit of maidens beginning to bud? What can you know of the subdued, shadowy, , grinning hunt that the lover of nornettes may conduct on the benches of old parks, in the scented penumbra of basilicas, on the graveled paths of suburban cemeteries, in the Sunday hour at the corner of the nursing home, at the doors of the hospice, in the chanting ranks of parish processions, at charity bazaars: an amorous, intense, and-alas-inexorably chaste ambush, to catch a closer glimpse of those faces furrowed by volcanic wrinkles, those eyes watering with cataract, the twitching movement of those dry lips sunken in the exquisite depression of a toothless mouth, lips enlivened at times by a glis­ tening trickle of salivary ecstasy, those proudly gnarled hands, nervously, lustfully tremulous, provocative, as they tell a very sfow rosary! Can I ever recreate, Reader-friend, the sinking desperation on sighting that elusive prey, the spas­ modic shiver at certain fleeting contacts: an elbow's nudge in a crowded tram-"Excuse me, madam, would you like a seat?" Oh, satanic friend, how dared you accept the moist look of gratitude and the "Thank you, young man, how kind!", when you would have have prefe rred to enact on the spot a bacchic drama of possession?-the grazing of a venerable knee as your calf slides between two rows of seats in the pomeridian solitude of a neighborhood cinema, or the tender but controlled grasp-sporadic moments of extreme contact!-of the skeletal arm of a crone you helped cross at the light with the prim concern of an eagle scout. The vicissitudes of my idle youth afforded me other encounters. As I have said, I had a reasonably engaging appearance, with my dark cheeks and the tender countenance of a maiden oppressed by a delicate virility. I was not unaware of adolescent love, but I submitted to it as if paying a toll, fulfilling the requirements of my age. I recall a May evening, shortly before sunset, when in the garden of a patrician villa-it was in the Varese region, not far from the lake, red in the sinking sun-I lay in the shade of some bushes with a fledgling sixteen-year-old, all freckles and powerless in the grip of a dismaying storm of amorous feelings toward me. And it was at that moment, while I was listlessly granting her the desired wand of my pubescent thaumaturgy, that I saw, Reader, at a window of the upper floor, the form of a decrepit nanny· bent almost double as she unrolled down her leg the shapeless mass of a cotton stocking. The breathtaking sight of that swollen limb, with its varicose marbling, stroked by the clumsy movement of the old hands unrolling the lumpy article of clothing, seemed to me (to my concupiscent eyes!) a brutal and enviable phallus soothed by a virginal caress: and it was at that moment that, seized by an ecstasy redoubled by distance, I exploded, gasping, in an effusion of biological assent that the maiden (foolish tadpole, how I hated you!) welcomed, inoaning, as a tribute to her own callow charms. Did you then ever realize, my dull-witted instrument of redirected passion, that you had enjoyed the food of another's repast, or did the dim vanity of your unripe years portray me to you as a fiery, unforgettable accomplice in sin? After leaving the next day with your family, you sent me a week later a postal card signed "Your old friend." Did you perceive the truth, revealing to me your perspicacity in the careful employment of that adjective, or was yours simply a bravado use of jargon, the mettlesome high-school girl rebelling against correct epistolary 1 style? Ah, after that, how I stared, trembling, at every window in the hope of glimpsing the flaccid silhou­ ette of an octogenarian in the bath! How many evenings, half hidden by a tree, did I consummate my solitary debauches, my eyes trained on the shadow cast against a curtain, of some grandmother sweetly engaged in gumming a meal! And the horrid disappointment, immediate and destructive (tiens, done, le salaud!), when the figure, abandoning the falsehood of those ombres chinoises, revealed itself at the sill for what she was, a naked ballerina with swelling breasts and the tanned hips of an Andalusian mare! So for months and years I coursed, unsated, in the deluded hunt for adorable nornettes, caught up in a pursuit that was born, indestructible, I am sure, at the moment of my birth, when a toothless old midwife-my father's desperate search at that hour of the night had produced only this hag, with one foot in the grave!-rescued me from the viscous prison of the maternal womb and revealed to me, in the light of life, her immortal countenance: a jeune parque. I seek no justification from you who read me (a la guerre comme a la guerre ); I am merely explaining to you how inevitable was the concurrence of events that brought me to my triumph. The soiree to which I had been invited was a sordid petting party with young models and pimply university students. The sinuous lewdness of those aroused maidens, the negligent offering of their breasts through unbuttoned blouses in the swirl of the dance, disgusted me. I was already thinking to run away from that place of banal traffic among crotches as yet intact, when a shrill, strident sound (will I ever be able to express the dizzying pitch, the hoarse descent of those vocal cords, long exhausted, the allure su­preme de ce cri centenaire? ), the tremulous lament of an ancient female, plunged the assembly into silence. And in the frame of the doorway I saw her, the face of the rmote Norn of my natal shock, the cascading enthusiasm of her lasciviously white locks, the stiffened body that stretched the stuff of the little, threadbare black dress into acute angles, the legs now thin and bent opposing arcs, the fragile line of her vulnerable femur outlined under the ancient modesty of the venerable skirt. The insipid maiden who was our hostess made a show of tolerant politeness. She raised her eyes to heaven as she said, "She's my granny . . . " At this point the intact part of the manuscript ends. What can be inferred from the scattered lines that follow suggests that the story continued more or less in this fashion: A few days later, Umberto Umberto abducts his hostess's grandmother, carrying her off on the handlebars of his bicycle, toward Piedmont. At first he takes her to a home ,for the aged poor, where, that same night, he possesses her, discovering among other things that the woman is not without previous experience. At daybreak, as he is smoking a cigarette in the semidarkness of the garden, he is approached by a dubious-looking youth who asks him slyly if the old woman is really his grandmother. Alarmed, Umberto Umberto leaves the institution with Granita and begins a dizzying race over the roads of Piedmont. He visits the wine fair at Canelli, the annual truffle festival at Alba, participates in the historical pageant at Caglianetto, inspects the livestock market at Nizza Monferrato, and follows the election of Miss Milkmaid in lvrea and the sack race in honor of the patron saint's day in Condove. At the end of his mad odyssey through that northern region, he realizes that for som time his bicycle has been slyly followed by an eagle scout on a motorscooter, who eludes every attempt to trap him. One day, at lncisa Scapaccino, when he takes Granita to a chiropodist, leaving her alone for a few minutes while he goes to buy cigarettes, he discovers, on returning, that the old woman has abandoned him, running off with her new kidnapper. For several months he sinks into deep depression, but finally finds the old woman agam, fresh from a beauty farm where her seducer has taken her. Her face is without a wrinkle, her hair is a coppery blond, her smile is dazzling. Umberto Umberto is overwhelmed by a profound sense of pity and a resigned despair at the sight of this destruction. Without a word, he purchases a shotgun and sets out in search of the villain. He finds the young scout at a campsite rubbing two sticks together to light a fire. He shoots once, twice, three times, repeatedly missing the youth, until finally two priests wearing leather jackets and black berets overpower him. Promptly arrested, he is sentenced to six months for illegal possession of firearms and hunting out of season. 1959 Fragments Proceedings, JV Intergalactic Congress of Archeological Studies, Sirius, 4th section, Mathematical Year 121. Paper read by chair Prof Anouk Ooma of the Department of Archeology, Prince Joseph's Land University, Arctica, Earth. Distinguished colleagues, You are surely not unaware that for some time Arctic scholars have been engaged in intense research and have, as a result, brought to light numerous relics of the ancient civilization that flourished in the temperate and tropical zones of our planet before the catastrophe of the year the known as 1980, in the ancient era, or, more correctly, Year One, after the Explosion destroyed every trace of life in those zones. For millennia afterward, as everyone knows, they remained so contaminated by radioactivity that until a few decades ago our expeditions could approach these territories only at extreme risk, despite the eagerness of scientists to reveal to the whole Galaxy the degree of civilization achieved by our remote ancestors. One mystery will always remain with us: How could human beings inhabit areas so unbearably torrid, and how could they adapt to the insane way of living necessitated by the alternation of brief periods of light with equally brief periods of darkness? And yet we know that the ancient earthlings, in that blinding vertigo of obscurity and clarity, managed to establish efficient biorhythms and develop a rich and articulate civilization. About seventy years ago (to be precise, in the year 1745 post explosion), from the advanced base at Reykjavik, the legendary southernmost point of terrestrial life, an expedition led by Professor Amaa A. Kroak advanced as far as the desert once known as France. There, that unparalleled scholar proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the combined_ effects of radioaction and time had destroyed all fossil evidence. There seemed no hope, then, that anything would ever be known about our distant progenitors. Previously, in 1710 P.E., the expedition led by Professor Ulak Amjacoa, thanks to generous support provided by the Alpha Centauri Foundation, had taken soundings in the radioactive waters of Loch Ness and recovered what is today generally considered the first "cryptolibrary" of the ancients. Encased in an enormous block of cement was a zinc container with the words incised on it: BERTRAND US RUSSELL SUBMERSIT ANNO HOMINIS MCMLI. This container, as all of you know, held the volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and finally supplied us with that enormous body of data about the vanished civilization that have, to a great extent, formed the basis of our present historical knowledge. It was not long before other cryptolibraries were discovered in other areas (including the famous one in a sealed case in the Deutschland Territory with the inscription TENEBRA APPROPINQUANTE). It soon became clear that among the ancient earthlings only men of culture sensed the approaching tragedy. They tried to offer some remedy in the only way available to them: that is, saving for posterity the treasures of their civilization. And what an act of faith it was, for them to foresee, despite all evidence to the contrary, any posterity at all! Thanks to these pages, which we cannot regard without emotion today, distinguished colleagues, at last we are able to know how that world thought, how its people acted, how the final drama unfolded. Oh, I realize full well that the written word provides an inadequate testimony of the world in which it was written, but think how handicapped we are when we lack even this valuable aid! The "Italian problem" offers us a typical example of the enigma that has fascinated archeologists and historians, none of whom has yet been able to give an answer to the familiar question: Why, in that country, the seat of an ancient civilization, as we know and as books discovered in other la;ds amply demonstrate-why, we ask, has it been impossible to find any trace of a cryptolibrary? You know that the hypotheses forwarded in answer to this question are as numerous as they are unsatisfactory; but at the risk of repeating what you already know, I will list them for you briefly: 1) The Aakon-Sturg Hypothesis, proposed with admirable erudition in The Explosion in the Mediterranean Basin, Baffin, 1750 P. E. A combination of thermonuclear phenomena destroyed the Italian cryptolibrary. This hypothesis is supported by sound argument, because we know that· the Italian peninsula was the most heavily hit when the first atomic missiles were fired from the Adriatic coast, initiating the total conflict. 2) The Ugum-Noa Noa Hypothesis, expounded in the widely read Did Italy Exist? (Barents City, 1712 P.E.). Here, on the basis of careful examination of the reports of high-level political conferences held before the total conflict, the author reaches the conclusion that "Italy" never existed. While this hypothesis neatly resolves the problem of cryptolibraries (or, rather, of their absence), it seems contradicted by a series of reports provided in the English and German languages concerning the culture of the "Italian" people. Documents in the French language, on the other hand, Ugum-Noa Noa reminds us, ignore the subject altogether, thus lending some support to his bold idea. 3) The Hypothesis of Professor Ixptt Adonis (cf. Italia, Altair, 22nd section, Mathematical Year 120). This is without doubt the most brilliant hypothesis of all, but also the least substantiated. It argues that at the time of the Explosion the Italian National Library was, for unspecified reasons, in a state of extreme disarray; that Italian scholars, rather than concern themselves with establishing libraries for the future, were seriously worried about their library of the present, having to make enormous efforts just to prevent the collapse of the building that actually housed the volumes. This hypothesis betrays the ingenuousness of a modern, non-earthling observer quick to weave a halo of legend around everything regarding our planet, accustomed to considering earthlings as a people who lived in idle bliss, gorging on seal pie and strumming reindeer-horn harps. On the contrary, the advanced degree of civilization reached, by the ancient earthlings before the Explosion makes such criminal neglect inconceivable, the more so since exploration of the other cisequatorial countries has revealed the existence of quite advanced techniques of book conservation. And so we come full circle. The darkest mystery has always enshrouded Italian pre-Explosion culture, even though for he early centuries the cryptolibraries of other countries supply adequate documentation. True, in the course of careful excavation some interesting if puzzling documents, highly fragile, have been discovered. I will cite here the small paper fragment unearthed by Kosamba. Its text, he rightly considers, illustrates the Italian taste for brief and pithy poems. I quote the text in its entirety: "In the middle of the pathway of this our life." Kosamba also found the jacket of a volume, obviously a treatise on horticulture, entitled The Name of the Rose, by a certain Ache or Eke (the upper part of the relic is unfortunately torn, so the exact name is uncertain, as Sturg indicates). 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). Despite these valuable documents, no one has yet been able to form a precise picture of the spiritual level of that people, a level, if I may venture to say so, distinguished colleagues, that is fully communicated only by the poetic word, by poetry as imaginative awareness of a world and of a historical position. If I have permitted myself this long but I hope not unhelpful preface, it is because I wish to report to you now, with great emotion, how I and my accomplished colleague Baaka B. B. Baaka A.S.P.Z. of the Royal Institute of Literature of Bear Island made an extraordinary find in a forbidding region of the Italian peninsula, at a depth of three thousand meters. Our trove was sealed fortuitously in a stream of lava and providentially sunk into the depths of the earth by the frightful upheaval of the Explosion. Worn and tattered, with many sections missing, almost illegible and yet filled with breathtaking revelations, this small book is of modest appearance and dimensions, bearing on the title page the words: Great Hit Songs of Yesterday and Today. (Considering the site of the discovery, we have called it Quaternulus Pompeianus). We all know, my dear colleagues, that the word "song" corresponds to the Italian canzone or canzona, an archaic term indicating certain poetic compositions of the ancient fourteenth century, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica confirms; and we assume that the word "hit," like the word "beat" (found elsewhere), must be associated with rhythm, a characteristic that music shares with the mathematical and genetic sciences. Among many peoples rhythm had assumed also a philosophical significance and was used to indicate a special quality of artistic structures (cf. the volume found in the Cryptobibliotheque National de Paris, M. Ghyka, Essai sur le rhythme, N.R.F. 1938). Our Quaternulus is an exquisite anthology, then, of the most worthy poetic compositions of the period, a compendium of lyric poems and songs that open to the mind's eye an unparalleled panorama of beauty and spirituality. Poetry of the twentieth century of the ancient era, in Italy as elsewhere, was a poetry of crisis, boldly aware of the world's impending fate. At the same time, it was a poetry of faith. We have here a linealas, the only legible one-of what must have been an ode condemning terrestrial concerns: "It's a ma­terial world." Immediately after that we are struck by the lines of ail.other fragment, apparently from a propitiatory or fertility hymn to nature: "I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain, it's a glorious feeling . . ." It is easy to imagine this sung by a chorus of young girls: the delicate words evoke the image of maidens in white veils dancing at sowing time in some pervigilium. But elsewhere we find a sense of desperation, of clear awareness of the critical moment, as in this merciless depiction of solitude and confused identity, which, if we are to believe what the Encyclopaedia Britannica says of the dramatist Luigi Pirandello, might lead us to attribute the text to him: "Who? Stole my heart away? Who? Makes me dream all day"? Who . . . " Another canzona ("Mine in May, his in June. She forgot me mighty soon") suggests a worthy correlative to some English verses of the same period, the song of James Prufrock by the poet Thomas Stearns, who speaks of an unspecified "cruellest month." Did this searing anguish perhaps drive some exponents of poetry to seek refuge in the georgic or the didactic? Take, for example, the pristine beauty of this line: "A sleepy lagoon, a tropical moon . . . " Here you have the familiar and symbolic use of water imagery, then the regal and sublime presence of the moon, hinting at human frailty in the face of the mysterious immensity of nature. And I'm sure you will share my admiration for these verses: "June is bustin' out all over, all over the meadow and the plain; the corn is as high as an elephant's eye . . ." Clearly the text derives from the rites of fertility, the spirit of spring and of human sacrifice, perhaps a maiden's heart offered to the earth mother. Such rites were, in their day, analyzed in the England Region in a book of uncertain attribution usually called The Golden Bough, though some read the title as The Golden Bowl (cf. passim the study, as yet untranslated, by Axbzz Eowrrsc, "Golden Bough or Golden Bowl? Xpt Agrschh Clwoomai," Arcturus, 2nd section, Mathematical Year 120). It is tempting to link the same fertility rites or, more precisely, the Phrygian rite of the death of Atys, with another beautiful song that begins: "I went down to the St. James Infirmary, to see my baby there, laid out on a cold white table . . . " The reference to Saint James suggests the Spanish Santiago, and a happy intuition led us to recognize this also as the name of a celebrated pilgrimage city. We then realized that we had come upon an uncompleted translation of an Iberian poem. As we all are sadly aware, no Spanish text has ever been recovered, since, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica informs us, about twenty years before the Explosion the religious authorities of that nation ordered the burning of all books that did not have a particular nihil obstat. But for some time now, thanks to brief quotations found in foreign volumes, we have formed a fairly clear idea of the figure of the mythic Catalan bard of the nineteenth or twentieth century, Federico Garcia, also identified as Federico Lorca, barbarously murdered, the legend goes, by twenty-five women whom he had coldly seduced. A German writer of 1966 (C. K. Dyroff, Lorca: Ein Beitrag zum· Duendegeschichte als flamencowissenschaft) speaks of Lorca's poetry as of a "being-in-death-rooed-like-love, wherein the spirit of the time is named revealing itself to itself through funereal danced cadences under an Andalusian sky." These words, unusually suited to the abovementioned text, allow us also to attribute to the same author other magnificent verses, of hot Iberian violence, printed in the Quaternulus: "Cuando caliente el sol su esta playa . . . " If I may take the liberty, dear friends, today, when spatiovision sets are bombarding us constantly with an avalanche of murky and dreadfully imitative music, today, when the irresponsible bawlers of drivel teach their children songs with absurd words, of recalling the crucial essay "The Decline of Arctic Man," which describes how an unknown bandleader actually set to music an obscene verse typical of drunken sailors ("No, I will not see it, Ignacio's blood on the sand"), the latest product of industrial nonsense. Let me now say that those immortal lines of Lorca, which reach us from the dark night of time, testify to the moral and intellectual stature of an earthling of two thousand years ago. We have before us a poem that is not based on the tortuous, labyrinthine research of an intellect bloated with culture but employs rhythms that are spontaneous and elementary, pure in their youthful grace; a poem that leads us to think that a God, not creative travail, is responsible for such a miracle. Great poetry, ladies and gentlemen, is universally recognizable; its stylemes cannot be mistaken; there are cadences that reveal their kinship even if they resound from opposite ends of the cosmos. So it is with joy and profound emotion, distinguished colleagues, that I have finally succeeded in making a scholarly collation, by placing an isolated verse found on a scrap of paper two years ago among the ruins of a Northern Italian city into the context of a more extensive song whose complete text I believe I have now assembled on the basis of two pages in the Quaternulus. An exquisite composition, rich in learned references, a jewel in its Alexandrine aura, perfect in its every turn of phrase: Ciao ciao bambina Get thee to a nunnery Nunnery, hey nonny! Come back to Sorrento As dreams are made on... I'm afraid the time allowed me for this paper is up. I would like to discuss the material further, but I am confident that I will be able to translate and publish, once I have solved a few delicate philological problems, the fruits of my invaluable discovery. In conclusion, I leave you with the image of this lost civilization that, dry-eyed, sang its own destruction of values, and with lighthearted elegance uttered diamond words that depicted for all time a world of grace and beauty. But with a presentiment of the end there was also a prophetic sensitivity. From the bottomless, mysterious depths of the past, from the worn and defaced pages of the Quarternulus Pom­peianus, in one verse isolated on a page darkened by radiation we find perhaps a presage of what was to happen. On the very eve of the Explosion, the poet saw the destiny of the earth's population, which would build a new and more mature civilization on the icecap of the pole and find in Inuit stock the. superior race of a renewed and happy planet. The poet saw that the way of the future would lead from the horrors of the Explosion to virtue and progress. Seeing this, he no longer felt fear or remorse; and so into his song poured out this verse, direct as a psalm: "Button up your overcoat if you're on a spree. Take good care of yourself." Just one verse; but to us, children of the prosperous and progressive Arctic, it comes as a message of faith and solidarity from the chasm of pain, beauty, death, and rebirth, in which we glimpse the beautiful and beloved countenance of our fathers. 1959 The Socratic Strip When she appears on the little stage of the Crazy Horse, shielded by a black mesh curtain, Lilly Niagara is already naked. Something more than naked: she is wearing an undone black bra and a garter belt. During the first part of her number she dresses in-, dolently, or rather, she slips on stockings, and fastens them to the casual harness that dangles over her limbs. She devotes the second part of her act to returning to the initial situation. Thus the audience, uncertain whether this woman has dressed or undressed, does not realize that practically speaking she has done nothing, because the slow, pained movements, delicately underlined by the anguish of her facial expression, simply declare her determined professionalism and faithfully follow a grand tradition now codified even in instruction manuals; and thus nothing is unexpected, nothing is seductive. Com­pared to the techniques of other grand mistresses of striptease, who know how to gauge accurately their offer of an introductory innocence, which they conelude with abundant, unpredictable slyness, lasciviousness kept in reserve, with savage twists for the final outrage (mistresses, in sum, of a dialectic, Occidental strip), the technique of Lilly Niagara is already beat and hard. It recalls, on sober consideration, the Cecilia of Moravia's La noia, a bored sexuality composed of indifference, here spiced by an expertise borne like a penance. Lilly Niagara, then, wishes to achieve the ultimate level of striptease. She does not present the spectacle of a seduction directed at no one, that makes promises to the crowd but withdraws the offer at the last moment; rather, she crosses the final threshold and denies even the promise of seduction. So if the traditional striptease is the suggestion of a coitus that suddenly proves to be interruptus, provoking in devotees a mystique of privation, the strip of Lilly Niagara chastises the presumption of her new disciples, revealing to them that the promised reality is only to be contemplated, and that even the complete enjoyment of that contemplation is denied, for it must take place in silent immobility. Lilly Niagara's Byzantine art preserves, however, the habitual structure of conventional striptease and its symbolic nature. It is only in some boites of the most total ill fame that at the end of the performance you can induce the performer to sell herself. At the Crazy Horse you are instructed, with the greatest urbanity, that it is not considered proper to ask to purchase photographs. What can be seen appears only for a few minutes within the magic area of the stage. And if you read the articles on stripping that enrich some of the publications on sale in the leading theaters, you realize that the nude dancer typically exercises her profession with strict diligence, dedicating herself in her private life to domestic affections, to the young fiance who accompanies her to her job, or, totally submissive, to a jealous husband within impervious walls. Nor should this be thought merely a cheap device. In the bold and more innocent Belle Epoque, however, managers went to great lengths to convince the customers that their divas were insatiable monsters in private as in public, devourers of men and wealth, priestesses of the most unspeakable refinements in the boudoir. But the Belle Epoque staged its sumptuous sinfulness for a well-to-do ruling class, to whm the theater and the after-theater had to bow, a class who enjoyed the total possession of objects, the inalienable privilege of money. The striptease you can see for quite reasonable sums and at any hour of the day, even in your shirt sleeves-no dress code-and even twice, because the spectacle is nonstop, this striptease is addressed to the average citizen. And in offering him those minutes of religious concentration, its theology is implied, introduced in the form of hidden persuasion and displayed through quaestiones. The essence of this theology is that the faithful worshiper can admire the luxurious goods of female plenitude but cannot make use of them, because such dominion is not his to command. He can use, if he wishes, the women that society grants him and that destiny has assigned him. But a crafty notice at the Crazy Horse warns him that if, when he goes home, he finds his wife 1 unsatisfactory, he can enroll her in the afternoon courses in deportment and mime that the manage­ment organizes for students and housewives. It is notcertain such courses actually exist or that the customer would dare make such a suggestion to his better half ; what matters is that the seed of doubt is planted in his mind, the suspicion that if the stripteaseuse is Woman, then his wife is something else, whereas if his wife is Woman, then the stripteaseuse must be something more, the Female Principle or sex or ecstasy or sin or glamor. She is, in any case, that which is denied him, the spectator; the basic element that eludes him, the goal of ecstasy that he cannot achieve, the sense of triumph that is arrested in him, the fullness of the senses and the dominion of the world that he knows only from hearsay. The typical striptease relationship demands that the woman, who has offered the definitive spectacle of her possibilities of satisfaction, is absolutely not for consumption. A booklet distributed at the Concert Mayol contains a wearily rakish introductory essay, which concludes, nevertheless, with a revealing intuition. It says, roughly, that the triumph of the naked woman in the spotlights, as she exposes herself to the gaze of a frustrated and yearning audience, consists of the artful awareness that at that moment they are comparing her with their familiar fare, and so her triumph consists also of the humiliation of others, while the The Socratic Strip pleasure of those who watch consists mainly of their own humiliation, felt, suffered, and accepted as the essence of the ritual. If, psychologically speaking, the striptease relationship is sadomasochistic, sociologically this sadomasochism is essential to the educational rite that is being fulfilled. The striptease unconsciouly teaches the spectator, who seeks and accepts frustration, that the means of production are not in his possession. But if sociologically it introduces an undeniable hierarchy of caste (or, if you prefer, of class), metaphysically the striptease leads the spectator to compare the pleasures at his disposal with those that by their very nature he cannot have: his reality compared with the ideal, his women compared with Womanhood, his experience of sex compared with Sex, the nudes he possesses compared with the hyperuranian Nudity he will never know. Afterward, he will have to go back to the cave and be content with the shadows on the wall: those are granted to him. And thus, with unconscious synthesis, the striptease restores the Platonic situation to the sociological reality of oppression and other-direction. Sustained by the fact that the command buttons of political life do not belong to him and that the pattern of his experiences is sanctioned by a realm of ideas he cannot alter, the striptease spectator can peacefully return to the responsibilities of every day, after the cathartic ritual that has confirmed his posi­tion as a fixed and solid element in the existing order; and locales less ascetic than the Crazy Horse (monastery for Zen monks, last stage of perfection) will allow him to carry away the images of what he sees there, to console his human condition with the wicked practices that his devotion and his solitude will suggest. 1960 Regretfully, We Are Returning Your... Readers' Reports Anonymous, The Bible I must say that the first few hundred pages of this manuscript really hooked me. Action-packed, they have everything today's reader wants in a good story. Sex (lots of it, including adultery, sodomy, incest), also murder, war, massacres, and so on. The Sodom and Gomorrah chapter, with the transvestites putting the make on the angels, is worthy of Rabelais; the Noah stories are pure Jules Verne; the escape from Egypt cries out to be turned into a major motion picture . . . In other words, a real blockbuster, very well structured, with plenty of twists, full of invention, with just the right amount of piety, and never lapsing into tragedy. 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. The end result is a monster omnibus. It seems to have something for everybody, but ends up appealing to nobody. And acquiring the rights from all these different authors will mean big headaches, unless the editor take cares of that himself. The editor's name, by the way, doesn't appear anywhere on the manuscript, not even in the table of contents. Is there some reason for keeping his identity a secret? I'd suggest trying to get the rights only to the first five chapters. We're on sure ground there. Also come up with a better title. How about The Red Sea Desperadoes? Homer, The Odyssey Personally, I like this book. A good yarn, exciting, packed with adventure. Sufficient love interest, both marital fidelity and adulterous flings (Calypso is a great character, a real man-eater); there's even a Lo­lita aspect, with the teenager Nausicaa, where the author doesn't spell things out, but it's a turn-on anyway. Great dramatic moments, a one-eyed giant, cannibals, even some drugs, but nothing illegal, because as far as I know the lotus isn't on the Narcotics Bureau's list. The final scene is in the best tradition of the Western: some heavy fist-swinging, and the business with the· bow is a masterstroke of suspense. What can I say? It's a page turner, all right, not like the author's first book, which was too static, all concerned with unity of place and tediously overplotted. By the time the reader reached the third battle and the tenth duel, he already got the idea. Remember how the Achilles-Patroclus story, with that vein of not-so-latent homosexuality, got us into trouble with the Boston authorities? But this second book is a totally different thing: it reads as smooth as silk. The tone is calmer, pondered but not pon­derous. And then the montage, the use of flashbacks, the stories within stories . . . In a word, this Homer is the right stuff. He's smart. Too smart, maybe . . . I wonder if it's all really his own work. I know, of course, a writer can improve with experience (his third book will probably be a sensation), but what makes me uncomfortable-and, finally, leads me to cast a negative voteis the mess the question of rights will cause. I broached the subject with a friend at William Morris, and I get bad vibes. In the first place, the author's nowhere to be found. People who knew him say it was always hard to discuss any changes to be made in the text, because he was blind as a bat, couldn't follow the manuscript, and even gave the impression he wasn't completely familiar with it. He quoted from memory, was never sure exactly what he had written, and said the typist added things. Did he really write the book or did he just sign it? No big deal, of course. Editing has become an art, and many books are patched together in the editor's office or written by several hands (like Mommy Dearest) and still turn out to be bestsellers. But this second book, there is too much unclear about it. Michael says the rights don't belong to Homer, and certain aeolian bards will have to be paid off, since they are due royalties on some parts. A literary agent who works out of Chios says the rights belong to the local rhapsodists, who virtually ghosted the book; but it's not clear whether they are active members of that island's Writers' Guild. A PR in Smyrna, on the other hand, says the rights belong exclusively to Homer, only he's dead, and therefore the city is entitled to all royalties. But Smyrna isn't the only city tat makes such a claim. The impossibility of establishing if and when Homer died means we can't invoke the '43 law regarding works pub­lished fifty years after the author's death. At this point a character by the name of Callinus pops up, insisting not only that he holds all rights but that, along with The Odyssey, we must buy a package including Thebais, Epigoni, and The Cyprian Lays. Apart from the fact that these aren't worth a dime, a number of experts think they're not even by Homer. And how do we market them? These people are talking big bucks now, and they're seeing how far they can push us. I tried asking Aristarchus of Samothrace for a preface; he has clout, and he's a good writer, too, and I thought maybe he could tidy the work up. But he wants to indicate, in the body of the book, what's authentic and what isn't; we end up with a critical edition and zilch sales. Better leave the whole thing to some university press that will take twenty years to produce the book, which they'll price at a couple hundred dollars a copy, and maybe a few libraries will actually buy it. Bottom line: If we take the plunge, we're getting ourselves into an endless legal hassle, the book will be impounded, but not like one of those sex books, which they then sell under the counter. This one will just be seized and forgotten. Maybe ten years from now Oxford will buy it for The World's Classics, but in the meantime you'll have spent your money, and it'll be a long wait before you see any of it again. I'm really sorry, because the book's not bad. But we're publishers, not detectives. So I'd say pass. Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy Alighieri is your typical Sunday writer. (In everyday life he's an active member of the pharmacists' guild.) Still, his work shows an undeniable grasp of technique and considerable narrative flair. The book, in the Florentine dialect, consists of about a hundred rhymed chapters, and much of it is interesting and readable. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of astronomy and certain concise, provocative theo­logical notions. The third part of the book is the best and will have the widest appeal; it involves subjects of general interest, concerns of the common readerSalvation, the Beatific Vision, prayers to the Virgin. But the first part is obscure and self-indulgent, with passages of cheap eroticism, violence, and downright crudity. This is a big problem: I don't see how the reader will get past this first "canticle," which doesn't really add much to what has already been written about the next world in any number of moral tracts and treatises, not to mention the Golden Legend of J acopo da Varagine. But the greatest drawback is the author's choice of his local dialect (inspired no doubt by some crack­pot avantgarde idea). We all know that today's Latin needs a shot in the arm-it isn't just the little literary cliques that insist on this. But there's a limit, after all, if not in the rules of language then at least to the public's ability to understand. We have seen what happened with the so-called Sicilian poets: their pub­lisher went around on bicycle distributing the books among the various outlets, but the works ended up on the remainders counter anyway. Further, if we publish a long poem in Florentine, we'll have to publish another in Milanese and