by Umberto Eco
MISREADINGS 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 com- bined 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 '.., 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 con- sidered the first "cryptolibrary" of the ancients. En- cased in an enormous block of cement was a zinc container with the words incised on it: tT,NnUS RUSSELL SUBMERSIT ANNO HOMINIS MCMLI. This con- tainer, 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
Fragments 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 APPROPINQLIANTE). 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 civili- zation. 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 paes, 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 pro- vides 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 lads amply demonstrate why, we ask, has it been impossible to find any trace of a cryptolibrary? You know that the hypotheses for- warded 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: 17
MISREADINGS 1) The Aakon-Sturg Hypothesis, proposed with admirable erudition in The Explosion in the Mediter- ranean Basin, Baffin, 1750 e.E. A combination of thermonuclear phenomena destroyed the Italian cryptolibrary. This hypothesis is supported by sound argument, because we know tha the Italian peninsula was the most heavily hit when the first atomic mis- siles 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 e.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 con- clusion that "Italy" never existed. While this hy- pothesis 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 Ital,an people. Documents in the French language, on the other hand, Ugum-Noa Noa reminds us, ignore the subject altogether, thus lending some sup- port 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
Fragments 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 Explo- sion 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 the early centuries the cryptolibraries of other countries supply adequate documentation. True, in the course of careful excavation some inter- esting 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 quot 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 19
MISREADINGS 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 WTER wHI 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 communi- cated only by the poetic word, by poetry as imagi- native 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, al- most illegible and yet filled with breathtaking reve- lations, this small book is of modest appearance and dimensions, bearing on the title page the words: Great Hit Songs of Yesterday and Today. (Consid- ering 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 20
Fragments 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 Cryptobibliothque 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 elsewhe
re, 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 line-- alas, the only legible one--of what must have been an ode condemning terrestrial concerns: "It's a ma- terial world." Immediately after that we are struck by the lines of another 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 esy 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 21
MISREADINGS what the Encyclopaedia Britannica says of the dra- matist Luigi Pirandello, might lead us to attribute the text to him: "Who? Stole my heart away? Who? Makes me dream all day'? Who . "Another can- zona ("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 ex- ponents 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 untran- slated, by Axbzz Eowrrsc, "Golden Bough or Golden Bowl? Xpt Agrschh Clwoomai," Arcturus, 2nd sec- tion, Mathematical Year 120). It is tempting to link the same fertility rites or, more precisely, the Phrygian rite of the death of 22
Fragments 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 San- tiago, 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 au- thorities 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 qttotations 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 mur- dered, the legend goes, by twenty-five women whom he had coldly seduced. A German writer of 1966 (C. K. Dyroff, Lorca: Ein Beitrag zum. Duendege- schichte als �lamencowissenschaft) speaks of Lorca's poetry as of a "being-in-death-roo_ted-like-love, wherein the spirit of the time is named revealing itself to itself through funereal danced cadences under an Andalusian sky." Thse 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 23
MISREADINGS 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 uni- versally recognizable; its stylemes cannot be mis- taken; there are cadences that reveal their kinship even if they resound from opposite ends of the cos- mos. So it is with joy and profound emotion, distin- guished 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: 24
Fragments 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 dia- mond 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 bot- tomless, mysterious depths of the past, from the worn and defaced pages of the Quarternulus Pom- peianus, 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 polk 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: 25
MISREADINGS "Button up your overcoat if you're on a spree. Take good care of yourself." Just one verse; but to us, children of the prosper- ous 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 26
The Socratic Strip When she appears on the little stage of the Crazy Horse, shielded by a black mesh curtain, Lilly Ni- agara 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 un- dressed, does not realize that practically speaking she has done nothing, because the slow, pained move- ments, delicately underlined by the anguish of her facial expression, simply declare her determined pro- fessionalism and faithfully follow a grand tradition now codified even in instruction manuals; and thus nothing is unexpected, nothing is seductive. Com- pared to the techniques of other grand mistresses of striptease, who know how to gauge accurately their offer of an introductory innocence, which they con- 27
MISREADINGS clude with abundant, unpredictable slyness, lascivi- ousness kept in reserve, with savage twists for the final outrage (mistresses, in sum, of a dialectic, Oc- cidental strip), the technique of Lilly Niagara is al- ready 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 prom- ises 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 tra- ditional striptease is the suggestion of a coitus that suddenly proves to be interruptus, provoking in dev- otees a mystique of privation, the strip of Lilly Ni- agara chastises the presumption of her new disciples, revealing to them that the promised reality is only to be contemplated, and that even the complete enjoy- ment of that contemplation is denied, for it must take place in silent immobility. Lilly Niagara's Byz- antine 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 photo- graphs. What can be seen appears only for a few minutes within the magic area of the stage. And if
