On Literature

by Umberto Eco

  Roberto could have been born between 1926 and 1931. Educated along Fascist lines, his first act of rebellion (subconscious rebellion, of course) was his reading of comics (badly) translated from American. Flash Gordon against Ming was for him the first image of the fight against tyranny. The Phantom may have been a colonialist, but instead of imposing Western models on the natives of the jungle in Bengali, he tried to preserve the wise, ancient traditions of the Bandar. Mickey Mouse the journalist fighting against corrupt politicians for the survival of his newspaper was Roberto's first lesson in the freedom of the press. In 1942 the government forbade speech bubbles and a few months later suppressed all American characters; Mickey Mouse or Topolino was replaced by Toffolino, a human, not an animal character, in order to preserve the purity of the race. Roberto began secretly collecting the pieces he had once read, a bland and painful protest.

  In 1939 Ringo from Stagecoach was the idol of a generation. Ringo fought not for an ideology or a fatherland but for himself and a prostitute. He was antirhetorical and therefore anti-Fascist. Also anti-Fascist were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, because they were opposed to Luciano Serra the pilot, the character in the imperialist Fascist film that Vittorio Mussolini had also helped make. The human model to whom Roberto turned was an appropriate mix of Sam Spade, Ishmael, Edward G. Robinson, Chaplin, and Mandrake. I imagine that for an American, even in a period of mass nostalgia, there would be nothing that would link Jimmy Durante, the Gary Cooper of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the James Cagney of Yankee Doodle Dandy and the crew of the Pequod. But for Roberto and his friends there was a thread that united all these experiences: these were all people who were happy to live and unhappy to die, and they constituted the rhetorical counterpoint to the Fascist Superman who celebrated Sister Death and went toward his own destruction holding two grenades and with a flower in his mouth, as the Fascist song said.

  Roberto and his generation also had their own music: jazz. Not just because it was avant-garde music, which they never felt was different from that of Stravinsky or Bartok, but also because it was degenerate music, produced by blacks in the brothels. Roberto became antiracist for the first time because of his love of Louis Armstrong.

  With these models in mind Roberto somehow joined the partisans in 1944 at a very young age. After the war he was either a member or a fellow traveler of a left-wing party. He respected Stalin, was against the American invasion of Korea, and protested against the execution of the Rosenbergs. He left the party at the time of the Hungarian crisis. He was firmly convinced that Truman was a Fascist and that Al Capp's Li'l Abner was a left-wing hero, a relation of the down-and-outs of Tortilla Flat. He loved Eisenstein but was firmly convinced that cinematic realism was also there in Little Caesar. He adored Hammett and felt betrayed when the hard-boiled novel came under the aegis of the McCarthyite Spillane. He thought that a northwest passage for socialism with a human face was on The Road to Zanzibar with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour. He rediscovered and popularized the epic of the New Deal, he loved Sacco, Vanzetti, and Ben Shahn, before the 1960s (when they became famous again in America) he knew the folk songs and protest ballads of the American anarchist tradition, and in the evening listened with his friends to Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Alan Lomax, Tom Jodd, and the Kingston Trio. He had been initiated into the myth of Americana, but now his bedside book was Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds.

  This is why when the generation of '68 launched its challenge, perhaps even against men like Roberto, America was already a way of life, even though none of those youngsters had read Americana. And I am not talking about jeans or chewing gum, the America that dominated Europe as the model for the consumer society: I am still talking about the myth that had emerged in the 1940s, which was somehow still operational deep down. Of course, for those young people America as a Power was the enemy, the world's policeman, the foe to be defeated in Vietnam as much as in Latin America. But that generation's front was by now on four sides: their enemies were capitalist America, the Soviet Union that had betrayed Lenin, the Italian Communist Party that had betrayed the revolution, and lastly, the Christian Democrat establishment. But if America was an enemy as a government and as the model for a capitalist society, there was also an attitude of rediscovery and recovery of America as a people, as a melting pot of races in revolt. They no longer had in mind the image of the Marxist American of the 1930s, the man in the Lincoln Brigades in Spain, the "premature anti-Fascist" reader of the Partisan Review. Rather, they identified a labyrinthine camp in which there was a mixture of oppositions between old and young, black and white, recent immigrants and established ethnic groups, silent majorities and vocal minorities. They did not see any substantial difference between Kennedy and Nixon, but they identified with the Berkeley campus, Angela Davis, Joan Baez, and the early Bob Dylan.

  It is difficult to define the nature of their American myth: they somehow used and recycled bits of American reality, the Puertoricans, underground culture, Zen, not so much comics as Comix, and so not Felix the Cat but Fritz the Kat, not Walt Disney but Crumbs. They loved Charlie Brown, Humphrey Bogart, John Cage. I am not charting the profile of any particular political movement between 1968 and '77. Maybe I am drawing an x-ray image, revealing something that continued to live underneath the Maoist, Leninist, or Che Guevarist surface. I know I am photographing something that was there, because this something exploded in and after 1977. The student revolt of that time resembled more a black ghetto uprising than the storming of the Winter Palace. And I suspect that the secret, clearly subconscious model for the Red Brigades was the Manson family.

  I certainly cannot speak of the present generation with the same Olympian detachment with which I discussed the 1930s generation. I am trying to identify, in the confusion of the present, the model for the American image-myth. Something invented like previous ones, the product of creolization.

  America is no longer a dream, since you can get there at low cost with a budget airline.

  The new Roberto was perhaps a member of a Marxist-Leninist group in 1968, threw the odd Molotov cocktail at an American consulate in 1970, some cobblestones at the police in 1972, and at the window of a Communist bookshop in 1977. In 1978, after avoiding the temptation to join a terrorist group, he saved some money and flew to California, perhaps becoming an ecological revolutionary or a revolutionary ecologist. For him America has become not the image of future renewal but a place to lick his wounds and console himself after his dream was shattered (or prematurely reported dead). America is no longer an alternative ideology, it is the end of ideology. He got his visa easily, because in fact he was never enrolled in any of the parties of the genuine Left. If Pavese and Vittorini were still alive, they would not have been able to get one, because they, the authors of our American dream, would have had to reply "Yes" on the consulate form asking whether you have ever been a member of a party that wants to subvert American society. American bureaucracy is not a dream; if anything, it is a nightmare.

  Is there a moral in this story of mine? None, and several. To understand the Italian attitude toward America, and in particular the attitude of anti-American Italians, you must also remember Americana and all that happened in those years, when left-wing Italians dreamed of Comrade Sam and, pointing their finger toward his image, would say: "I want you."

  Originally written as a paper for a conference held at Columbia University in January 1980 on "The Image of America in Italy and the Image of Italy in America." The original paper was for an American audience, hence the abundance of information on several Italian figures, from Vittorio Mussolini to Vittorini.

  THE POWER OF FALSEHOOD

  In his Quaestio QuodlibetalisXII. 14, Saint Thomas Aquinas replies to the question "Utrum Veritas sit fortior inter vinum et regem et mulierem," in other words, whether the power of truth is more potent, more persuasive, and more constricting than the authority of a king, the influence of wine, or the fascination of a woman.

  The reply given by
Aquinas—who respected the king, did not disdain, I believe, the odd glass of good wine at his table, and had proved that he could resist the temptations of women by chasing with a burning brand the naked courtesan whom his brothers had introduced into his bedroom to persuade him to become a Benedictine and not dishonor the family by donning the mendicant habit of the Dominicans—was, as usual, subtle and complex: wine, rulers, women, and truth are not comparable because "non sunt unius generis' (they are not of one genus). But if one considers them "per comparationem ad aliquem effectum (by comparing them in their effects), they all can move the human heart to some course of action. Wine acts on our corporeal aspect, "quod facitper temulentiam loqui" (since it makes us speak through drink), while our animal-sensitive nature can be swayed by "delectatio venerea' (erotic pleasure), or in other words by a woman (Thomas could not conceive of sexual impulses on the other side that could legitimately move a woman, but we cannot expect Thomas to be Heloise). As for the practical intellect, it is obvious that the king's wishes, or the rule of law, has power over it. But the only force that moves the speculative intellect is truth. And since " vires corporales subiciuntur viribus animalibus, vires animales intellectualibus, et intellectuales practicae speculativis ... ideo simpliciter Veritas dignior est et excellentior et fortior' (bodily power is subject to animal powers, and our animal powers are inferior to intellectual strength, and practical intellectual strength is second to speculative intellectual power ... then it is clear that truth is worthier, more excellent, and stronger).

  Such then is the power of truth. But experience teaches us that truth often takes a long time to prevail, and the acceptance of truth costs blood and tears. Might it not happen that something dubious shows similar force, whereby it would be legitimate to talk of the power of the falsehood?

  To show that the falsehood (not necessarily in the form of a lie, but certainly in the form of an error) has been the engine behind many historical events, I would have to appeal to a criterion of truth. But if I chose this in too dogmatic a manner, my discourse would run the risk of ending the very moment it began.

  If one maintained that all myths, all revelations in every religion, were nothing but lies, then, since belief in gods, of whatever kind, has shaped human history, we could only conclude that we have been living for millennia under the rule of falsehood.

  However, we would then be guilty not only of banal euhemerism: the fact is that this same skeptical argument would appear singularly related to its opposite argument about the importance of faith. If you believe in any revealed religion, you have to admit that if Christ is the Son of God, then he is not the Messiah that Jerusalem is still waiting for, and if Mohammed is Allah's prophet, then it is an error to make sacrifices to the Plumed Serpent. If you are a follower of the most enlightened and indulgent theism, ready to believe at the same time in the Communion of Saints and the Great Wheel of the Tao, then you will reject as the fruit of error the massacre of infidels and heretics. If you are a worshipper of Satan, you will think the Sermon on the Mount puerile. If you are a radical atheist, no faith will be anything but a mistake. Consequently, since in the course of history many have acted in the belief of something that someone else did not believe in, we are obliged to admit that for each of us, in different measure, History has been largely a Theater of Illusions.

  Let us stick, then, to a less contentious notion of truth and falsehood, even though it is philosophically contestable—but we all know that if we listened to philosophers everything would be contested, and we would never get anywhere. Let us stick to the criterion of scientific or historical truth that has been accepted by Western culture; in other words, to the criterion whereby we all accept that Julius Caesar was killed on the Ides of March, that on 20 September 1870 the troops of the young kingdom of Savoy entered Rome by the breach of Porta Pia, that sulphuric acid is H2SO4, or that the dolphin is a mammal.

  Naturally each of these notions is liable to revision on the basis of new discoveries: but for the time being they are recorded in the Encyclopedia, and until proved otherwise we believe it to be a factual truth that the chemical composition of water is H2O (and some philosophers believe that this truth must hold true in all possible worlds).

  At this point we can say that in the course of history it has been the case that credit has been given to beliefs and assertions that today's Encyclopedia says are factually false; and such credit as to conquer the wise, cause the birth and collapse of empires, inspire poets (who are not always witnesses to truth), push human beings to heroic sacrifices, intolerance, massacres, or the search for truth. If that is so, how can we not assert that the power of falsehood exists?

  The almost canonical example is that of Ptolemy's hypothesis. Today we know that for centuries humanity accepted a false representation of the universe. It tried all possible tricks to make good the falsity of the image, it invented epicycles and deferents, in the end it tried with Tycho Brahe to have all the planets move around the sun provided that it continued to move around the earth. It was on the basis of this image that not just Dante Alighieri acted, which is not significant, but also the Phoenician navigators, Saint Brendan, Erik the Red, and Christopher Columbus (and one of the above was the first to reach America). Moreover, but on the basis of a false hypothesis, man managed to divide up the globe into parallels and meridian degrees, as we still do, only changing the first meridian from the Canaries to Greenwich.

  The example of Ptolemy, which by association triggers the memory of Galileo's unfortunate story, seems deliberately created to lead one to think that my history of falsehood and its power, in its secular boldness, only concerns cases where a dogmatic thought has refused to accept the light of truth. But let us consider a story of the opposite hue, the story of another false opinion, patiently constructed by modern secular thinking to defame religious thought.

  Try an experiment, and ask an ordinary person what Christopher Columbus was aiming to prove when he wanted to reach the East by sailing to the West, and what the learned men of Salamanca obstinately denied in order to stop his voyage. The reply, in most cases, will be that Columbus thought the earth was round, while the wise men of Salamanca held that it was flat and that after a short while the three caravels would plunge into the cosmic abyss.

  Nineteenth-century lay thought, irritated by the fact that the church had not accepted the heliocentric hypothesis, attributed the idea that the earth was flat to the whole of Christian thought (patristic and scholastic). Nineteenth-century positivism and anticlericalism went to town with this cliché, which, as Jeffrey Burton Russell has shown, was reinforced during the battle fought by the supporters of Darwin's ideas against all forms of fundamentalism. * It was a question of proving that just as the churches had been wrong about the roundness of the earth, so they could be mistaken about the origin of species.

  They then exploited the fact that a fourth-century Christian author like Lactantius (in his Institutiones Divinaé), who had no choice but to regard as correct many biblical passages in which the universe was described as being modeled on the Tabernacle, and therefore as a quadrangle, was opposed to pagan theories of the roundness of the earth, also because he could not accept the idea that the antipodes existed where men would have to walk with their heads upside down ...

  Finally it was discovered that a sixth-century Byzantine geographer, Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Topographia Christiana, had maintained that the cosmos was rectangular, with an arch that curved over the flat floor of the earth (once more the archetype was the Tabernacle). In an authoritative book, History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler by J. L. E. Dreyer, it was admitted that Cosmas was not an official representative of the church, but a lot of space was given to his theory.† Although E. J. Dijksterhuis concedes in The Mechanization of the World Picture that Lactantius and Cosmas must not be considered representative of the scientific culture of the church fathers, he asserts that Cosmas's theory became the prevailing opinion for many centuries to come.‡
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  The fact is that Lactantius was left to stew in his own juice by early and medieval Christian culture, and Cosmas's text, written in Greek, and therefore in a language that the medieval Christian had forgotten, was made known to the Western world only in 1706, in Montfaucon's Collectio Nova Patrum et Scriptorum Graecorum. No medieval author knew Cosmas, and he was regarded as an authority of the "dark ages" only after his work had been published in English in 1897!

  Ptolemy knew, of course, that the earth was round; otherwise he would not have been able to divide it into 360 meridian degrees. Eratosthenes knew it as well, since in the third century B.C. he had calculated the length of the Equator in broadly accurate terms. In fact, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Eudoxus, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes all knew of it—and it turns out that the only people who did not believe it were two materialist philosophers, Leucippus and Democritus.

  Macrobius and Martianus Capella were also well aware that the earth was round. As for the church fathers, they had to cope with the biblical text that mentioned the damned tabernacle shape, but Augustine, even though he did not hold strong opinions on the matter, knew the views of the ancients, and agreed that sacred scripture spoke in metaphors. His position is rather a different one, one quite common in Patristic thought: since it is not by knowing the shape of the earth that one's soul is saved, the question appeared to him to be of little interest. At a certain point Isidore of Seville (who was no model of scientific accuracy) calculates that the length of the equator was eighty thousand stadia. Could he have thought the earth was flat?

  Even a first-year high-school student can easily deduce that if Dante enters the cone of Hell and comes out the other side to see unfamiliar stars at the foot of Mount Purgatory, this means that he knew perfectly well that the earth was round. But let's forget about Dante, since we tend to think he can do no wrong. The fact is that the same opinion was held by Origen and Ambrose, and in the Scholastic period many writers—such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, John of Holy-rood, Pierre d'Ailly, Giles of Rome, Nicole d'Oresme, and John Buridan, to name but a few—spoke and thought of the earth as spherical.