Chronicles of a Liquid Society

by Umberto Eco

  Such shoddy material gave rise to a virtuous campaign of indignation to discredit, as usual, someone who has no love for our prime minister and wears turquoise socks. Yet no one thought to point out that Berlusconi could not be compared to Hitler, since, as everyone knows, Hitler was monogamous.

  2011

  Suspects behaving badly

  I once wrote an article complaining about the disturbing practice in movies and television series of showing couples in bed who, before going to sleep, (i) have sex, (ii) argue, (iii) she says she has a headache, and (iv) they turn away from each other reluctantly and go to sleep. Never, I repeat never, does either of them read a book. And then we complain that people, whose behavior is modeled on television, never read.

  But worse than that: what happens if detectives or police officers arrive at your house and start questioning you, perhaps about something not necessarily compromising? If you’re an inveterate criminal who has been unmasked, or a known member of the Mafia, or a pathological serial killer, you might react with scorn and laughter or fall to the ground with a fake epileptic seizure. But if you’re a normal person with nothing to hide, you’ll invite them to sit down, answer their questions, perhaps feeling a certain concern but looking at them politely. If, then, you have some tinge of guilt, you’ll take all the more care not to upset them.

  But what happens in television crime stories? Let me admit, so as not to be taken for a condescending moralist: I always watch them with interest, especially those French and German series where, except for Alarm für Cobra 11, there is no excess of violence or tetranitratoxycarbon explosions. In television crime stories it always—note, always—happens that when police officers go into a building and start questioning someone, this person carries on just the same: he gazes out the window, finishes cooking his eggs and bacon, tidies the room, brushes his teeth, even looks as though he’s about to use the toilet, sits at the table signing papers, or rushes to the telephone. In other words, he hops about like a squirrel, ignoring the officers as much as possible, before rudely telling them after a while that they have to leave since he has things to do.

  But is this how to behave? Why do directors of TV crime stories insist on creating an idea in the minds of their viewers that police officers are to be treated like importunate vacuum cleaner salesmen? You’ll say that bad behavior by the suspect triggers an urge for comeuppance on the part of the viewer, who will then be pleased when the humiliated detective wins, and this is true. But what happens if less sophisticated viewers treat the police like that on their first encounter, thinking that’s the way to behave? Perhaps those who watch the series aren’t too worried about this, since certain real-life personalities, far more illustrious than the petty crooks investigated by police officer Siska, have taught us that it’s not even necessary to turn up in court.

  In truth, when the interview lasts more than a few seconds, the TV director knows that two actors can’t be kept staring into each other’s faces, and there has to be some kind of movement in the scene. And to create movement, the suspect has to be moved about. And why can’t the director sustain, or make the viewer sustain, a few minutes in which two people look at each other, especially if they’re talking about something of great dramatic interest? Because to do so requires a director at least as great as Orson Welles, and the actors have to be Anna Magnani, or Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, or Jack Nicholson in The Shining, people who are comfortable in the foreground and close-up, and can express their mood with their eyes, with a twist of the mouth. In Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart could talk for several minutes without Michael Curtiz, who was no Eisenstein, allowing himself even a medium-full shot, but if every week you have to film an episode, and sometimes two, the producer can’t allow himself a director like Curtiz. And as for the actors, so much the better if, as happens in German police dramas, they give their best performance when they’re munching würstel sandwiches between one computer search and another.

  2012

  Shaken or stirred?

  In a recent Italian translation of Live and Let Die, James Bond is described as ordering a martini cocktail with “red” Martini. It is heresy to talk of a martini with sweet vermouth, and a previous Italian translation referred to gin and Martini & Rossi, which is something else. According to various early chronicles, the first martini cocktails, invented in America in the 1800s, were said to have been made with two ounces of Italian “Martini and Rosso,” one ounce of Old Tom gin, plus maraschino and other ingredients that cause every well-educated person to shudder with horror. But even though Martini Rosso appeared in 1863, according to other experts the martini cocktail was first known in its present form using not Martini vermouth but Noilly Prat, and the name Martini became associated with the original cocktail either from a California town called Martinez or from a barman named Martinez. In short, for its whole intricate history, see Lowell Edmunds’s indispensable Martini, Straight Up.

  So what does James Bond drink? In reality, he drinks anything he can get his hands on. In the opening lines of Goldfinger, Ian Fleming, who was a master of style, wrote: “James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.” And the first martini that 007 drinks, in Casino Royale, is what would pass into history as a Vesper martini: “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.” The Kina Lillet is another and rarer type of dry vermouth, and Bond would also be seen drinking a Vesper martini in Quantum of Solace.

  In fact, Bond usually drinks a martini as we know it, but when he orders one he specifies that it’s to be shaken, not stirred—in other words, the ingredients are to be put into a shaker (as happens with other cocktails) but not mixed in a mixer. The problem is rather that, from Hemingway on, to make a good martini, a measure of dry vermouth is poured into a mixer already full of ice, the gin is added, it is mixed, and the liquid is strained into the classic triangular glass into which the olive is then dropped. But experts argue that, having poured in the vermouth and mixed it well, a grid should be placed over the mixer and the vermouth thrown away, leaving just a patina that flavors the ice cubes, after which the gin is poured in, and the chilled gin flavored with the trace of dry vermouth is then filtered out. The ratio between gin and vermouth varies from expert to expert, including the version according to which only a ray of light should be allowed to pass through the vermouth bottle until it touches the ice, and no more. In the version that Americans call a gin martini on the rocks, the ice is also poured into the glass, to the disdain of connoisseurs.

  Why does an expert like Bond want his martini shaken and not stirred? Some suggest that if the martini is shaken, it introduces more air into the mixture—called bruising the drink—thus improving the flavor. But personally, I don’t believe a gentleman like James Bond wants his martini shaken. In fact, some Internet sites claim that the phrase, though it appears in the films, never appears in the novels (just as “Elementary, my dear Watson” never appears in Conan Doyle), except perhaps in relation to the much-debated vodka martini. But I confess that if I’d checked the complete works of Fleming, who knows when this article would have been written.

  2013

  Too many dates for Nero Wolfe

  For purely temperamental reasons, I spent the two months up to Christmas rereading, or reading for the first time, the eighty Nero Wolfe stories. On immersing myself in that amiable universe, I was confronted by some problems that have obsessed fans of Rex Stout. First of all, what is or was the number of the famous brownstone on West 35th Street? In 1966, the Wolfe Pack, an association of fans of the Nero Wolfe stories, persuaded New York City to place a commemorative plaque at no. 454, but Stout referred to different numbers in his stories—no. 506 in Over My Dead Body, no. 618 in Too Many Clients, no. 902 in Murder by the Book, no. 914 in Prisoner’s Base, no. 918 in The Red Box, no. 922 in The Silent S
peaker, no. 939 in Death of a Doxy, etc.

  But this is by no means the only uncertainty in the saga. We are told, for example, that Wolfe came from Montenegro—he’d been born in Trenton, then moved to Montenegro as a child. But several times Wolfe mentions becoming a naturalized American citizen fairly late, so he couldn’t have been born in New Jersey. He was probably born in 1892 or 1893. But if that’s the case, he’d have been eighty-three in his last story, which is set in 1975, whereas in fact he comes across just as young as in the first story, which is set in 1934. The same is true of Stout’s narrator, Archie Goodwin, who, judging from a number of clues, appears to have been born in 1910 or 1912, yet in the stories that clearly take place at the time of the Vietnam War and after, he ought to be close to sixty, though he still appears as a thirty-year-old playboy able to charm attractive women in their twenties and to knock down characters much stronger than himself with a straight masterful punch.

  In short, could an author who from book to book gave flawless descriptions of the layout of Wolfe’s house, the food he ate, and the ten thousand orchids he cultivated, species by species, have failed to keep a general, biographically accurate record of his characters? There must be another explanation.

  In many popular sagas the characters are ageless; they never grow old. Superman has no age, nor does Little Orphan Annie, on whose eternal childhood many parodies are based, nor did the Phantom, who was engaged to Diana Palmer for around fifty years. This allowed their creators to make them act in an eternal present. The same was true of Wolfe and Goodwin, who were forever young. But at the same time Stout’s stories also reflect a careful attention to detail and the historical background. When Nero and Archie act as government agents during World War II or become involved in McCarthyism, Stout describes in obsessive detail particular roads, street corners, shops, taxi routes, and so forth. How did he give an eternal immovability to stories that needed continual reference to moments in history and to specific settings? By confusing the reader.

  As Stout whirled before the readers’ eyes dates that didn’t fit and anachronisms that would be unconscionable to anyone with a computer, he feigned an exaggerated realism, wanted us to live in an almost dreamlike state. In other words, he had his own far-from-simple idea about literary fiction. It’s no coincidence that he began his writing career, though with little success, as an almost experimental narrator, in How Like a God. And he understood the ways in which books are received. He didn’t imagine his readers would, like me, read his complete works one after another, but knew instead that they would come back to his books at yearly intervals, and therefore after their memories were reasonably vague about chronology. He played on the faithful and much-anticipated recollection of recurring situations—Wolfe’s habits, late-evening routines, moments in the kitchen—but left out major events. And in fact we can read these stories again and again with the pleasure of finding the same unchanging features, but having forgotten the most important thing, namely, who the murderer was.

  2014

  Unhappy is the land

  The press and television reported with satisfaction the aftermath of the recent fire on the Norman Atlantic ferry carrying passengers from Greece to Italy. Some passengers died or went missing, but overall the rescue operations were carried out efficiently. The media made particular mention of Captain Argilio Giacomazzi, who stayed on board to oversee the evacuation and was the last person to leave the ship. This was impressive, particularly after the abominable behavior of another captain who had jumped ship during a recent disaster, yet the word “hero” appeared in a number of reports.

  There’s no doubt that Captain Giacomazzi’s behavior was most proper, even if it were later to emerge that he shared some responsibility for causing the incident, and we hope all captains will behave like him in the future. But he is not a hero; he is a man who has performed his duty honestly and without shirking. The rules require a captain to be the last to leave his ship, and this exposes him to danger.

  What is a hero? If we accept Thomas Carlyle’s theory, a hero is a great man endowed with great charisma who has left his mark on history. In this sense Shakespeare and Napoleon are both heroes, even if they may have been timid men. But Carlyle’s idea was given short shrift by Tolstoy and, later, by social historians, who placed less emphasis on great events and more on economic and social structures. And yet, if we look at dictionaries and encyclopedias, a hero is someone who has done an exceptional deed he was not duty bound to carry out, risking his own life to the benefit of others. Salvo D’Acquisto was a hero when he saved twenty-two civilians from being executed by Nazi soldiers in 1943. No one expected him to assume a responsibility that was not his, to go before a firing squad and save the inhabitants of his village, but in doing so D’Acquisto went beyond the call of duty and was killed. You don’t have to be a soldier or a military leader to be a hero: a hero risks his life to save a drowning child or a fellow mine worker, or gives up the quiet routine of a local hospital to face the hazards of living in Africa among Ebola sufferers. When interviewed on his return, Captain Giacomazzi said, “Heroes are no use: my only thought is for those no longer with us.” A wise way to avoid being sanctified by the media.

  Why talk about heroes when people, however courageous and cool-headed, are simply doing their duty? Brecht reminds us in his play Galileo: “Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.” Why unhappy? Because it lacks people who do their duty honestly, responsibly, and “with professionalism.” That’s when a country searches desperately for a heroic figure, and awards gold medals left, right, and center.

  An unhappy land, then, is one whose citizens no longer know where duty lies, and seek a charismatic leader who tells them what to do. Which, if I remember correctly, is what Hitler promulgated in Mein Kampf.

  2015

  Time and history

  A recent television program dealt with how Italian children and young adults were educated under the Fascist regime of the 1920s and ’30s. One of the questions raised was whether the totalitarian education of a generation had a profound effect in shaping the Italian character. Pier Paolo Pasolini remarked that Italy’s national character has been modified more by postwar neocapitalism than by the years of dictatorship.

  Aside from neo-Fascist extremism, something of the Fascist legacy lingers in the national character, and continually reemerges—in racism, homophobia, male chauvinism, and anticommunism—yet these attitudes could also be found in provincial pre-Fascist Italy. Pasolini was right: the national character has been more deeply influenced by consumerism, by notions of free trade, by television.

  What did fascism require of Italians and force upon them? To believe, obey, and fight; to practice the cult of war, indeed to glorify death; to jump through hoops of fire; to produce as many children as possible; to regard politics as the primary purpose of existence; to think of Italians as the chosen ones. Have these traits remained in the Italian character? Not at all. Curiously, they have resurfaced in Islamic fundamentalism, as Hamed Abdel-Samad recently observed in L’Espresso. That’s where the fanatical cult resides—the glorification of the hero and “viva la muerte,” the submission of women, the sense of a permanent state of war. Very few Italians absorbed these ideas apart from right- and left-wing terrorists of the 1960s and ’70s, though even they were more prepared to kill others than sacrifice themselves.

  What has neocapitalism in its various guises had to offer, up to Berlusconismo? It has offered the right to acquire, perhaps on the installment plan, a car, a refrigerator, a washing machine, and a television; to regard tax evasion as a basic human right; to spend evenings devoted to entertainment, contemplating half-naked dancers or, at the furthest extreme, watching hard-core pornography at the click of a mouse; not to worry too much about politics or even about voting; to avoid financial hardship by not producing too many children—in short, to live comfortably without making sacrifices. Most of Italian society has enthusiastically endorsed this model. And those who dedicate their liv
es to helping desperate people in third-world countries remain a slender minority.

  2015

  Forms of Racism

  Women philosophers

  The old philosophical claim that men are capable of pondering the infinite while women give sense to the finite can be read in many ways. For example, since men cannot produce babies, they console themselves with Zeno’s paradoxes. But such ideas have led to the common notion that history, at least up to the twentieth century, has brought us great female poets and writers, and women in various branches of science, but no women philosophers or mathematicians.

  Such biases fostered the long-held view that women had no gift for painting, except for the likes of Rosalba Carriera or Artemisia Gentileschi. Since painting originally meant frescoing churches, it is natural that climbing on scaffolding wearing a skirt was not considered respectable, nor was it a woman’s job to run a workshop with thirty apprentices, but as soon as painting could be done on easels, women painters began to appear. It’s rather like saying the Jews were great at many arts except for painting, until Chagall. It’s fair to say that Jewish culture was primarily auditory rather than visual, and that divinity was not to be represented through images, but there’s a visual content of undoubted interest in many Jewish manuscripts. Yet during the centuries when figurative art was in the hands of the Catholic Church, it was unlikely that a Jew would be encouraged to paint Madonnas and crucifixions—it’s rather like being surprised that no Jew had ever become pope.