How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays

by Umberto Eco

  But this solution would inevitably produce the following situation: the territory would consist, once folding is completed, of the original terrain, plus an enormous folded map in its center. Thus the folded map, no longer consumable, would prove unfaithful as well, because it is known for certain that it would represent the territory without its folded self in the center. And there is no apparent reason why a map should be unfolded and consulted when it is known a priori to be unfaithful. On the other hand, if the map were to depict the territory with itself folded in the center, it would immediately become unfaithful every time it was unfolded.

  It could be assumed that the map is subject to a principle of indetermination, for it is the act of unfolding that makes a map faithful whereas, when folded, it is unfaithful. In this situation the map could be unfolded whenever there was a desire to make it faithful.

  There still remains, however (unless we have recourse to the partial, or summary, map), the problem of the position to be assumed by the subjects after the map has been unfolded and laid out with a different orientation. For it to be faithful each subject, once the unfolding is completed, must assume the position he had, at the moment of its creation, on the actual territory. Only at this cost will a subject resident at point 2 of the territory—on which, say, a point X2 of the map lies—be depicted exactly at point X1 of the map that currently lies, for example, on point Y of the territory. At the same time, every subject could obtain information from the map about a point of the territory different from the one where he resides—and about a subject different from himself.

  Toilsome as it may be, and full of practical difficulties, this solution makes the transparent and permeable map, spread out and adjustable, the best prospect, while obviating any need to settle for a summary map. But this map, too, like the previously mentioned ones, falls victim to the Normal Map paradox.

  3. The Paradox of the Normal Map

  When the map is installed over all the territory (whether suspended or not), the territory of the empire has the characteristic of being a territory entirely covered by a map. The map does not take account of this characteristic, which would have to be presented on another map that depicted the territory plus the lower map. But such a process would be infinite (the "third man" argument). In any case, if the process stops, a final map is produced that represents all the maps between itself and the territory, but does not represent itself. We call this map the Normal Map.

  A Normal Map is subject to a quasi-Russell-Frege paradox: every territory, plus a map representing it, can be seen as a normal set (the map does not belong to the set of objects that constitute the territory). But we cannot conceive sets of normal sets. Therefore we should think either of a not-normal set, in which the final map is part of the territory it represents (which is false, otherwise it should also represent itself) or of a normal set in which the final map is necessarily unfaithful, as explained above.

  Two corollaries follow:

  1. Every 1:1 map always reproduces the territory unfaithfully.

  2. At the moment the map is realized, the empire becomes unreproducible.

  It could be remarked that, with the second corollary, the empire fulfills its own most secret dream, that of making itself imperceptible to enemy empires; but thanks to the first corollary it would become imperceptible to itself as well. We would have to postulate an empire that achieves awareness of itself in a sort of transcendental apperception of its own categorial apparatus in action. But that would require the existence of a map endowed with self-awareness, and such a map (if it were even conceivable) would itself become the empire, while the former empire would cede its power to the map.

  Third corollary: every 1:1 map of the empire decrees the end of the empire as such and therefore is the map of a territory that is not an empire.

  1982

  How to Eat Ice Cream

  When I was little, children were bought two kinds of ice cream, sold from those white wagons with canopies made of silvery metal: either the two-cent cone or the four-cent ice-cream pie. The two-cent cone was very small, in fact it could fit comfortably into a child's hand, and it was made by taking the ice cream from its container with a special scoop and piling it on the cone. Granny always suggested I eat only a part of the cone, then throw away the pointed end, because it had been touched by the vendor's hand (though that was the best part, nice and crunchy, and it was regularly eaten in secret, after a pretense of discarding it).

  The four-cent pie was made by a special little machine, also silvery, which pressed two disks of sweet biscuit against a cylindrical section of ice cream. First you had to thrust your tongue into the gap between the biscuits until it touched the central nucleus of ice cream; then, gradually, you ate the whole thing, the biscuit surfaces softening as they became soaked in creamy nectar. Granny had no advice to give here: in theory the pies had been touched only by the machine; in practice, the vendor had held them in his hand while giving them to us, but it was impossible to isolate the contaminated area.

  I was fascinated, however, by some of my peers, whose parents bought them not a four-cent pie but two two-cent cones. These privileged children advanced proudly with one cone in their right hand and one in their left; and expertly moving their head, from side to side they licked first one, then the other. This liturgy seemed to me so sumptuously enviable, that many times I asked to be allowed to celebrate it. In vain. My elders were inflexible: a four-cent ice, yes; but two two-cent ones, absolutely no.

  As anyone can see, neither mathematics nor economy nor dietetics justified this refusal. Nor did hygiene, assuming that in due course the tips of both cones were discarded. The pathetic, and obviously mendacious, justification was that a boy concerned with turning his eyes from one cone to the other was more inclined to stumble over stones, steps, or cracks in the pavement. I dimly sensed that there was another secret justification, cruelly pedagogical, but I was unable to grasp it.

  Today, citizen and victim of a consumer society, a civilization of excess and waste (which the society of the thirties was not), I realize that those dear and now departed elders were right. Two two-cent cones instead of one at four cents did not signify squandering, economically speaking, but symbolically they surely did. It was for this precise reason that I yearned for them: because two ice creams suggested excess. And this was precisely why they were denied me: because they looked indecent, an insult to poverty, a display of fictitious privilege, a boast of wealth. Only spoiled children ate two cones at once, those children who in fairy tales were rightly punished, as Pinocchio was when he rejected the skin and the stalk. And parents who encouraged this weakness, appropriate to little parvenus, were bringing up their children in the foolish theater of "I'd like to but I can't." They were preparing them to turn up at tourist-class check-in with a fake Gucci bag bought from a street peddler on the beach at Rimini.

  Nowadays the moralist risks seeming at odds with morality, in a world where the consumer civilization now wants even adults to be spoiled, and promises them always something more, from the wristwatch in the box of detergent to the bonus bangle sheathed, with the magazine it accompanies, in a plastic envelope. Like the parents of those ambidextrous gluttons I so envied, the consumer civilization pretends to give more, but actually gives, for four cents, what is worth four cents. You will throw away the old transistor radio to purchase the new one that boasts an alarm clock as well, but some inexplicable defect in the mechanism will guarantee that the new radio lasts only a year. The new cheap car will have leather seats, double side mirrors adjustable from inside, and a paneled dashboard, but it will not last nearly so long as the glorious old Fiat 500, which, even when it broke down, could be started again with a kick.

  The morality of the old days made Spartans of us all, while today's morality wants all of us to be Sybarites.

  1989

  How It Begins, and How It Ends

  There is a drama in my life. I pursued my advanced studies as a guest of the University College
of Turin, where I had won a scholarship. Of those years I have retained the happiest of memories and a lasting dislike of tuna fish. It so happened that the college refectory remained open exactly one hour and a half for each meal. Those who arrived within the first half hour were served the specialty of the day; latecomers were given tuna. Except for the summer holidays and Sundays, then, over those four years I ate 1,920 meals featuring tuna fish. But that is not the drama I refer to.

  My drama springs from the fact that, while we students had no money, we still hungered for movies, music, and plays. So we would arrive at the theater ten minutes early and approach the gentleman—what was he called?—the leader of the claque, shaking his hand and slipping a hundred lire into his palm. Then he would admit us. We were a paying claque.

  It also happened that the doors of the college were locked inexorably at midnight. After that hour, those who were outside remained out, because there were no residential obligations, and if a student wished, he could be absent even for a month. Practically speaking, this meant that at ten minutes to midnight we had to leave the theater and scurry to our destination. But at ten minutes to midnight the play had not yet ended. And so it was that, over a four-year period, I saw the theatrical masterpieces of every time and place, except for their last ten minutes.

  Thus I have lived a lifetime without knowing if Oedipus faced up to the horrible revelation, or what became of the six characters in search of an author, whether Oswald Alving was cured thanks to penicillin, if Hamlet finally discovered that to be was better than not to be. I still don't know who the real Signora Ponza was, if Ruggero Ruggeri/Socrates drank the hemlock, if Othello punched up Iago before setting off on a second honeymoon, if the imaginary invalid's health improved, if everyone threw rice after Romeo and Juliet, and who was Bunbury. I thought I was the only human being afflicted by this ignorance until, casually reliving old memories with my friend Paolo Fabbri, I discovered that for years he has suffered from the same anguish in reverse. During his student years he worked in a theater, organized and run by students; his job was to stand at the door and take tickets. As many ticket-holders arrived late, he was never able to slip into a seat before the beginning of the second act. He saw Lear, blind and raving, wandering around with the corpse of Cordelia in his arms; but he had no idea what had brought the two of them to that ghastly pass. He heard Blanche Dubois profess her faith in strangers, but he racked his brain trying to figure out why such a sweet lady was being carted off to the bin. He never understood why Hamlet was so down on his uncle, who seemed a perfectly nice man. He saw Othello perform his dread act, but had no notion why such a docile little wife was being placed beneath a pillow and not on top of one.

  Well, to make a long story short, Paolo and I exchanged confidences. And we discovered that a splendid old age lies before us. Seated on the front steps of a country house or on a bench in the park, for years we will tell each other stories: he, endings; I, beginnings, amid cries of amazement at every discovery of prelude or catharsis.

  "You don't mean it! What did he say?"

  "He said: 'Mother, I want the sun!' "

  "Ah, then he was done for."

  "Yes, but what was wrong with him?"

  I whisper the answer in his ear.

  "My God, what a family! Now I understand...."

  "But tell me about Oedipus!"

  "There isn't a lot to tell. His Mom commits suicide and he blinds himself."

  "The poor kid. All the same ... they tried to tell him in every possible way."

  "True, I just can't figure it. Why didn't he understand?"

  "Put yourself in his place. The plague begins. He's a king, happily married...."

  "So when he married his Mom, he didn't—"

  "Of course not! That's the whole point."

  "It's like a Freud case history. If they told you, you wouldn't believe it."

  Will we be happier afterwards? Or will we have lost the freshness of those who are privileged to experience art as real life, where we enter after the trumps have been played, and we leave without knowing who's going to win or lose the game?

  1988

  How to Justify a Private Library

  Generally speaking, from my childhood on, I have been always subjected to two (and only two) kinds of joke: "You're the one who always answers" and "You resound in valleys." All through my early years I believed that, by some strange chance, all the people I met were stupid. Then, having reached maturity, I was forced to conclude that there are two laws no human being can escape: the first idea that comes into a person's mind will be the most obvious one; and, having had an obvious idea, nobody ever thinks that others may have had the same idea before.

  I possess a collection of review headlines, in all the languages of the Indo-European family, going all the way from "The Echo of Eco" to "A Book with Echoes." In the latter case I suspect the printed headline wasn't the first idea that came into the subeditor's mind. What probably happened was this: the editorial staff met, they debated some twenty possible titles, and finally the managing editor's face lighted up and he said, "Hey, guys, I've had a fantastic idea!" And the others responded, "Boss, you're a devil! Where do you get them?" "It's a gift," he must have replied.

  I'm not saying people are banal. Taking as divine inspiration, as a flash of originality, something that is obvious reveals a certain freshness of spirit, an enthusiasm for life and its unpredictability, a love of ideas—small as they may be. I will always remember my first meeting with that great man Erving Goffman, whom I admired and loved for the genius and penetration with which he could identify infinitesimal aspects of behavior that had previously eluded everyone else. We were sitting at an outdoor café when, looking at the street after a while, he said, "You know something? I believe there are too many automobiles in circulation in our cities." Maybe he had never thought this before because he had had far more important things to think about; he had just had a sudden epiphany and still had the mental freshness to express it. I, a little snob infected by the Unzeitgemässe Betrach-tungen of Nietzsche, would have hesitated to say it, even if I thought it.

  A second shock of banality occurs to many people in my condition—that is, people who possess a fairly sizable library (large enough in my case that someone entering our house can't help but notice it; actually, it takes up the whole place). The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" At first I thought that the question characterized only people who had scant familiarity with books, people accustomed to seeing a couple of shelves with five paperback mysteries and a children's encyclopedia, bought in installments. But experience has taught me that the same words can be uttered also by people above suspicion. It could be said that they are still people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage place for already-read books and do not think of the library as a working tool. But there is more to it than that. I believe that, confronted by a vast array of books, anyone will be seized by the anguish of learning, and will inevitably lapse into asking the question that expresses his torment and his remorse.

  The problem is that when someone says, "Eco? You're the one who always answers," you can reply with a little laugh and, at most, if you want to be polite, with "That's a good one!" But the question about your books has to be answered, while your jaw stiffens and rivulets of cold sweat trickle down your spine. In the past I adopted a tone of contemptuous sarcasm. "I haven't read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?" But this is a dangerous answer because it invites the obvious follow-up: "And where do you put them after you've read them?" The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office," a reply that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy, and on the other leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his de
parture.

  1990

  How to Compile an Inventory

  The Italian government has given assurances that something will be done to guarantee the autonomy of our country's universities. Italian universities were autonomous in the Middle Ages, and they functioned better than they do today. American universities, whose perfection has become legendary for Europeans, are autonomous. German universities are under the jurisdiction of the regional authorities, but local governments are more alert than a centralized administration, and in many cases—like the appointment of professors—the regional parliament merely ratifies formally what the university itself has already decided. In Italy, if a scientist discovers that phlogiston doesn't exist he will most likely be able to announce his finding only if he happens to teach a course on the Axiomatics of Phlogiston, because a course title, once it is on the ministry's lists, can be changed only after protracted negotiations among all the institutions of higher learning in the country, along with the Superior Council of Education, the Minister, and some other organizations whose names escape me.

  Research goes forward because someone glimpses a path that no one has seen before, and a few other people, with exceptional decisional flexibility, decide to believe in him or her. But if someone wants to move a desk in Vitipeno, a decision must come from Rome, after consultations with Chivasso, Terontola, Afragola, Montelepre, and Decimomannu, so obviously the desk will be moved only when the move is no longer necessary.

  Teachers engaged on temporary contracts ought to be outside scholars of great reputation and irreplaceable expertise. But between the submission of the university's request and notification of the ministry's approval we usually reach the end of the academic year, with only a few weeks of instruction remaining (unless the ministry simply says no). Clearly, in such an aleatory situation, it is hard to attract a Nobel laureate, and we end up with the dean's unemployed sister-in-law.