by Umberto Eco
In ancient times "paideia" was transmitted through philosophical conversation and a homosexual relationship. In modern times we use prescribed texts and school lessons. But recently "paideia" has also become involved with mass communication. Not only in the sense that the circulation of books is a feature of mass communication, but also because choosing one's own curriculum in the jungle of the mass media can constitute an instance of constructing one's own " humanitas." What I mean is that Woody Allen has something to do with "paideia," while John Travolta does not: but we must not be so dogmatic. If I think about my own growth in "humanitas," I would have to put on the list of my Spiritual Sources The Imitation of Christ, No No Nanette, Dostoyevsky, and Donald Duck. No place for Nietzsche or Elvis Presley. I agree with Joyce that "music hall, not poetry is a criticism of life." Ripeness is all.
It is with this idea of education in mind that I would like to chart in broad terms the history of three generations of Italians who, for different historical and political reasons, somehow considered themselves, or ought to have considered themselves, anti-American; and who, in some way, on their own, working against or indeed even in support of their anti-American ideology, created an American Myth.
The first character in my story signed the articles he wrote in the 1930s as "Tito Silvio Mursino." This was an anagram of Vittorio Mussolini, II Duce's son. Vittorio belonged to a group of young Turks fascinated by cinema as an art, an industry, a way of life. Vittorio was not content with being the son of the Boss, though this would have been enough to guarantee him the favors of many actresses: he wanted to be the pioneer of the Americanization of Italian cinema.
In his journal Cinema he criticized the European cinematographic tradition and asserted that the Italian public identified emotionally only with the archetypes of American cinema. He talked of cinema in terms of the "star system," with a certain frankness and without any aesthetic concerns. He genuinely loved and admired Mary Pickford and Tom Mix, just as his father admired Julius Caesar and Trajan. For him American films were the people's literature. And Oreste del Buono, in the Almanacco Bom piani 1980, noted that Vittorio was somehow, albeit unwittingly and in a different key, repeating Gramsci's theory of a "national-popular art," except that he went to find the roots of "national-popular" in the area between Sunset Boulevard and Malibu.
Vittorio was not an intellectual, nor even a great businessman. His trip to the USA to establish a link between the two cinematographic industries ended up as a fiasco: political gaffes, sabotage by the Italian authorities themselves (his father looked on the initiative with tremendous skepticism), irony from the American press. Al Roach said to him that after all he was a decent guy, why didn't he change his name?
However, let us reread some of Vittorio Mussolini's statements:
Is it perhaps heresy to state that the spirit, mentality and temperament of Italian youth, despite the logical, natural and inevitable differences in another people, are closer to those of the young people across the Atlantic than to the youth of Russia, Germany, Spain and France? Moreover, the American public loves films with broad horizons, is sensitive to real problems, is attracted by the childish but happy sense of adventure, and if this youthfulness is given to them by not having centuries of history, culture, systems and philosophical laws behind them, it is certainly much closer to our bold generation than to those of many old countries in Europe.
This was written in 1936. And this model of America remained valid until 1942, when the Americans became official enemies. But even in the case of the most violent wartime propaganda, the most hated enemies were the English, not the Americans. The radio propagandist Mario Appelius coined the slogan "Dio stra-maledica gli Inglesi!" (God double-damn the English!), but I do not recall an anti-American slogan that was as virulent and widely broadcast as this. In any case, popular sensibilities were certainly not anti-American. But perhaps the most interesting indication of this widespread feeling is to be found in the writings of young Fascist intellectuals who wrote for the journal Primato. Primato came out between 1940 and 1943, with one of the most contradictory figures of the Fascist regime as editor: Giuseppe Bottai. A liberal-fascist and anti-Semite, he was also an Anglophile who was regarded with suspicion by his German allies; he even authored an educational-reform program that was inspired in part by John Dewey. He was a supporter of avant-garde art but an enemy of the vulgar classicism that was official Fascist art, an aristocratic champion of human inequalities but opposed to intervention in the Spanish civil war. Bottai tried to gather the best young intellectuals of the time around Primato, filling the pages of the journal with the maximum amount of dissent that was compatible with the situation. Among the young contributors to Primato we find not only representatives of liberal anti-Fascism (Montale, Brancati, Paci, Contini, Praz) but also the best of what would become future Communist culture (Vittorini, Alicata, Argan, Banfi, Delia Volpe, Guttuso, Luporini, Pavese, Pintor, Pratolini, Zavattini).
It is striking to notice that, in February 1941, a brilliant young intellectual like Giaime Pintor could publish in the journal an article on the robotization of German soldiers, warning that Europe would never return to freedom so long as it was dominated by the dark shadow of German flags. Giaime Pintor had been brought up under Fascism, and day by day, article after article, he developed a lucid and courageous critique of the European dictatorships, writing in 1943, a few months before he died during the Resistance war, an article that he was unable to publish at the time:
Germany has gradually presented itself in our reflections as the natural antithesis of this world and by extension of this world's mirror in Europe. No people is closer to the Americans in the youthfulness of its blood and the openness of its desires, yet no people celebrates its own legend with such different words. Here too the roads of corruption and of purity are perilously close; but a constant folly drags the Germans off course and overwhelms them in inhuman and difficult exploits.
On either side there are forces capable of altering the course of our experience, of throwing us into a corner like useless scrap, or of leading us to safety on any shore at all. But America will win this war because its initial élan is following truer forces, because it believes that its goal is easy and right. "Keep smiling": this peace slogan came from America with a whole complement of edifying tunes, when Europe was an empty shopwindow and the austerity of behavior imposed on totalitarian countries revealed only the desperate and bitter face of Fascist reaction. The extreme simplicity of American optimism at that time might have enraged all those who were persuaded of the duty to wear mourning as a sign of humanity, and those who placed pride for their dead before the well-being of those who were alive. But the great pride of America in her children today will be the awareness that they have run up the steepest road in history, that they have avoided the dangers and ambushes latent in a development that has been almost without any holdup. Enrichment and bureaucratic corruption, gangsters and crises, all this has become part of a body that is developing. And this is the only history of America: a people that is growing, compensating with their constant enthusiasm for the mistakes they have made, and offering rescue from future dangers with their goodwill. The most hostile forces—illness and poverty—could meet on American soil, but the outcome of these risks and fears was always a positive mood, reiterating each time the exaltation of man.
The stupidity of one phrase hangs over America: a materialist culture. A culture of producers: this is the pride of a race that has not sacrificed its own strength to ideological ambitions and has not fallen into the easy trap of "spiritual values." It has made technology its own way of life, has felt new affections emerge from the daily practice of collective work, and new legends arise from the horizons it has conquered. Whatever Romantic critics might think, such a profoundly revolutionary experience has not ended in silence; and while in Europe after the last war people took up the themes of Decadence or formulas like surrealism that were devoid of a future, America expressed itself in
a new narrative and in a new language: it invented the cinema.
Many feel they know about American cinema, and their impressions combine those ambivalent feelings of attraction and disgust that have been described as one of our most incurable complexes as Europeans, but which no one has shed light on with the necessary vigor. Now that an enforced abstinence has cured us of its excess of publicity and of the disgust produced by habit, one can perhaps go back to the significance of that educational moment and recognize in American cinema the greatest message our generation has ever received.
Pintor was extraneous to the aristocratic dismissals of mass media that would become typical of the postwar European Left. Nowadays we might say he was closer to Benjamin than to Adorno.
Cinema is thus seen as a revolutionary weapon abolishing all political frontiers. But even on the aesthetic front American cinema teaches us to look at the world with fresh, innocent eyes, and has fulfilled Baudelaire's prayer by showing us "how wonderful and poetic we are, with our polished shoes and bourgeois ties." Today, Pintor reminded us, Germany is perpetuating the rhetoric of "the past." America, on the other hand, does not have any cemeteries to safeguard, her mission is the destruction of idols, while the Utopia of the new man, at that stage still a mere pronouncement in Marxist ideology, can be achieved wherever man learns not to surrender to mysticism and nostalgia, whether in America or in Russia.
Much of what we said about America may be naive and inexact, much may have to do with topics extraneous to the historical phenomenon of the USA and its present shape. But it matters little: because, even if that continent did not exist, our words would not lose their meaning. This America has no need of Columbus, it has been discovered inside ourselves, it is the land that one sets out for with the same hope and confidence as the first emigrants and as all who are determined to defend the dignity of the human condition even though it cost much labor and error.
With the image of this universal America in his heart, Giaime Pintor joined the British army in Naples and died trying to cross the German lines to organize the partisan resistance in Lazio. Where did this image of America come from? Pintor and Vittorio Mussolini, from opposite sides of the barricade, tell us that the myth came via cinema. But novels and stories had also played a role in its spread and its inspiration. And at the origin of this dissemination we find two writers, Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese. Both had grown up under Fascism: Vittorini tried his luck with Primato, Pavese had already been condemned to internal exile in 1935. Both were fascinated by the myth of America. Both would become Communists.
Vittorini collaborated with the publisher Bompiani, who had already in the 1930s started to publish Steinbeck, Caldwell, Cain, and other American writers, though Primato was constantly blocked by the Ministry of Popular Culture (the Minculpop), as is documented in a series of official letters (masterpieces of unintentional humor) that ban or threaten to confiscate this book or that because it expresses a nonheroic vision of life, or represents characters of inferior race, or portrays in too crude a language behavior that does not correspond to the Fascist and Roman ideal of morality. Pavese too worked as a translator, almost clandestinely, since he could not obtain proper permits, having been condemned as an anti-Fascist.
In 1941 Vittorini prepared for Bompiani Americana, an anthology of over one thousand pages, with texts by authors from Washington Irving to Thornton Wilder and Saroyan via O. Henry and Gertrude Stein, all translated by young writers with names like Alberto Moravia, Carlo Linati, Guido Piovene, Eugenio Montale, and Cesare Pavese.
From today's perspective the collection was quite comprehensive, perhaps a bit too enthusiastic, and certainly unbalanced: it undervalues Fitzgerald, overestimates Saroyan, and contains authors like John Fante, who would not retain such a prominent position in literary chronicles. This anthology was meant to be not a history of American literature, however, but rather the construction of an allegory, a kind of Divine Comedy where Paradise and Inferno were one.
Vittorini had already written in 1938 (in Letteratura volume 5) that American literature was a world literature with a single language, and that being American was the same as not being American, as being free from local traditions, and open to the common culture of humanity.
In Americana the first description of the United States is almost Homeric, with its images of plains and railways, snowy mountains and endless landscapes stretching from coast to coast. There was a lithographic innocence about it, a bit like Currier and Ives, an epic based not on any direct evidence but on pure intertextual fantasy. In it we find the same freedom with which Vittorini had translated and would translate his own American authors, all written in "Vittorini-speak," where an intense creativity pushed philological precision into second place. But the America that Vittorini draws here is a prehistoric land shaken by earthquakes and continental drift, where instead of dinosaurs and mammoths what dominates is the gigantic outline of Jonathan Edwards waking Rip van Winkle and challenging him to an epic duel with Edgar Allan Poe, who is riding on Moby-Dick. Even his critical judgments are metaphors and hyperboles:
Melville is Poe's adjective and Hawthorne's noun. He tells us that purity is ferocity. Purity is a tiger ... Billy Budd hanged. He is an adjective. But in the way that happiness is an adjective of life. Or as despair is an adjective of life.
America as chanson de geste. Pound and the blacks singing the blues.
America is today (because of the new legend that is taking shape) a kind of new fabulous Orient, and man appears in it, at different times, as an exquisite uniqueness, whether he is Philippine, Chinese, Slav, or Kurd, because he is substantially always the same: the lyrical "I," the protagonist of creation.
It was a multimedia book. Not just a book of literary excerpts and critical link passages, but also a superb anthology of photographs. Images taken by the photographers of the New Deal, who worked for the Works Progress Administration. I emphasize the photographic documentation because I learned about young people of the time who were culturally and politically regenerated by the impact of those very images: looking at them, they had the feeling of a different reality, a different rhetoric, or, rather, an antirhetoric. But the Minculpop could not accept Americana. The first edition, of 1942, was confiscated. It had to be republished without Vittorini's passages, but with a new preface by Emilio Cecchi, one that was more academic and more prudent, less enthusiastic and more critical, more "literary."
But even this emasculated version of Americana circulated and produced a new culture. Even without the pages written by Vittorini, the very structure of the anthology acted like a speech. The montage was the message. The very (highly debatable) way the American writers were translated produced a new sense of language. In 1953 Vittorini would say that he had influenced young people not by what he had translated but by how he had translated.
Already as far back as 1932, Pavese, writing about O. Henry, had said that America, like Italy, was a culture of dialects. But unlike Italy, in America the dialects had won out against the language of the ruling class, and American literature had transformed English into a new popular language. I remember that Pavese had turned to Piedmontese dialect for translating certain passages in Faulkner. One of his ideas was that there was an affinity between the Midwest and Piedmont. Once more this is Gramsci's "national-popular" notion, except that now, instead of rinsing his language in the Arno, as Manzoni had said, the writer rinsed it in the Mississippi.
We are talking of a case not of simple pidginization but rather of the creolization of a language.
Thus the generation that had read Pavese and Vittorini fought the partisan war, often in the Communist brigades, celebrating the October revolution and the charismatic figure of the people's Little Father, but remaining at the same time fascinated and obsessed by an America that was hope, renewal, progress, and revolution.
Vittorini and Pavese were adults by the end of the war, nearly forty. The second generation of my outline, on the other hand, contained youngsters
born in the 1930s. Many of them entered adult life, at the end of the war, as Marxists.
Their Marxism was not like Vittorini's or Pavese's, which was totally identified with the Liberation struggle and their hatred of Fascist dictatorships, more a sense of universal brotherhood than a precise ideology. For this second generation Marxism involved experience of political organization and philosophical commitment. This generations ideal was the Soviet Union, its aesthetic was socialist realism, its myth the working class. Politically opposed to America as an economic and political system, they did sympathize with certain aspects of American social history, with that "genuine America" that was characterized by the first pioneers and the early anarchist opposition movement. The "socialist" America of Jack London and Dos Passos.
It was for this very reason that, even in the fiercest moments of the McCarthy campaign, official Marxist culture never completely denied the spirit of Americana, even when Vittorini left the party because of his ideological dissent from its leader, Palmiro Togliatti.
However, what interests us is a different facet of this second generation, which could live both inside and outside the two Marxist parties of the time, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, and any definition of it would end up being so vague and imprecise that I am forced to indulge in a bit of fictional license. I will construct a fictitious character I will call Roberto. Among the members of the class that he is meant to represent, there will have been 90 percent Robertos and 10 percent Robertos. Mine will be 100 percent Roberto. Perhaps among the members of the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party there were not many Robertos; but Roberto inhabited more the territory outside the party, the territory of cultural activities, publishing houses, cinemas, newspapers, concerts, and it was in this very sense that he was culturally highly influential.
