Misreadings

by Umberto Eco

  MISREADINGS and try mentioning E = mc 2. They'll put you on trial for sabotage. Do you realize that the directors of the Boiler Room are still trained from a textbook written by Albert of Saxony, The Theory and Practice of Impetus, and the Handy Guide to the Vis Movendi commissioned by Buridan? And this is where the mixups come from. Only yesterday the Bureau of Planetary Initiative set up a system near the Nebula of the Swan. You should have heard them. They talked about a stabilization of the epicycle. Well, a nova exploded that they'll remember for a millennium. The whole zone radio- active. And try to find out who's res.ponsible. An accident, they say. But an accident means Chance, you know, and Chance means casting doubt on the Old Man's power. These are hardly trifling matters, and He knows it. He's very alert to such things. He personally wrote a memo to the joint Seven Heavens on the subversive theory of the statistics of Chance. What can be done, you ask? Why, with radical reorganization and a new expanding structure every- thing can be worked out. You ex.pand and expand, and one fine day you incorporate Hell again. And that's what they say they all want. Harmony, celestial harmony, all-embracing Love. You should hear them. But it's only talk. Gabriel, in his Jupiter address, spoke about our Heaven First policy. If you take a closer look, it means a contracting universe. Gabriel! What a character! If he could, he'd declare Earth out of bounds,, like Hell. He's never been able to bear E,arth. He handled the Annunciation, but his teeth were clenched the whole time. He could hardly re-

  The Latest from Heaven fuse. If you only knew what he went around saying afterward, about that girl . . . For him, the Son is too far to the left. You follow me? And he's never forgiven the Paraclete for Pentecost. Those twelve guys were already too smart, he says, all they needed was the gift of tongues! He's tough, and a demagogue. Hand-in-glove with Moses. For Gabriel, the aim of creation was the freeing of the chosen people from bondage in Egypt. Now we've done it, he says, so that's that. We should shut down the firm: it's not bringing in anything. If it weren't for the Son, by now Gabriel would have pulled it off. You might say: Well, .let's back the Son, and at the right moment he will make his move. But it's risky. The Old Man is smarter than they think, and He never forgives. And the idea of another fall of the angels scares everybody in this place. I mean everybody. Then there's the Ghost, he blows where he lists, the saying goes, so you never know what side he's on: Maybe when the right moment comes, he'll back out, and then where are we? The Son, too. let me tell you. He's left-wing, true enough. Everybody's to the left, to hear them talk. But do you think he'd accept--for example-- the uncertainty principle? "If you like, you can es- tablish the position of an electron, its energy, and even the year of its birth! Just watch me!" Doesn't he realize that for others it's not so easy? But to him this is all intellectuals' hot air: "The present state of the Heavens," he said in his Christmas message this year, "represents the best organizational plan with 59

  MISREADINGS which the Kingdom can advance toward the future while preserving respect for tradition: in short, prog- ress without risk!" You get it? This may all seem nonsense to you. The Earth goes ahead on its own, anyway; these characters quarrel among themselves, but nobody lays a finger on Earth for fear somebody else will want to get into the act. For us, however, it's a vital question. Those who live on the colony planets are virtually excluded from the Kingdom. And if not excluded, they have to go through torments, apply for citizenship in one of the Heavens--and then, forget it. You know: all day dancing in a ring and the only news y6u get is from the Blessed Vision. Yes, the one that extends all over the universe. What the Choirs want to be seen, what the Archangelic Union passes off as the Blessed Vision, that's all they see! The rest is fog. I tell you, they treat us like children. And He knows nothing about it. He thinks of Himself thinking and therefore believes everything is fine. So they won't touch the Aristotelian model; they flatter Him with the story of the First Cause, of absolute transcendence, and they keep everything from Him. Mind you, I'm not some kind of pantheist weirdo. Really, I'm not. I wouldn't want you to take me for a subversive or think I'm simply envious. We all agree that an Order is necessary, and He has every right to handle it. Still, He has to make some conces- sions. Times have changed, right? I tell you, it can't go on like this. Too much

  The Latest from Heaven unrest. The people are on the move. We've come to the boiling point. I give this another ten thousand years. Then you'll see. 1961 61

  The Thing "Well, Professor?" the General asked, with a hint of impatience. "Well what?" Professor Ka said. He was clearly stalling for time. "You've been working down here for five years, and nobody's disturbed you. We've demonstrated our faith in you. But we can't rely only on your word forever. The time has come when we must see for ourselves." There was a threatening edge in the General's voice. With a weary gesture, Ka smiled and said: "You catch me at my weakest moment, General. I wanted to wait a little longer, but you put me on the spot. I have made something . "His voice sank almost to a whisper. "Something enormous. And, by the Sun, people must know about it!" He waved, as if to usher the General into the cave. He led him to the back, to a place illuminated by a shaft of light that entered through a narrow aperture 62

  The Thing in the wall. Here, on a smooth ledge, Ka showed him the Thing. It was an almond-shaped object, nearly flat, its surface many-faceted, like a huge diamond, only opaque, with almost metallic glints. "Good," the General said, puzzled. "It's a stone." There was a sly flash in the Professor's blue eyes, beneath their bushy, bristling brows. "Yes," he. said, "it's a stone. But not a stone to be left lying on the ground, among other stones. It is meant to be grasped." "To be-- ?" "Grasped, General. This stone contains all the power that man has ever dreamed of, the secret of Energy, a million manpower. Look . " Cupping the palm of his 'hand, he crooked his fingers and placed them on the stone until he was clasping it, then raised his hand and, with it, the stone. The stone stuck to the hand, its thickest part stuck to the palm and the fingers, while the tip pro- truded and pointed at the ground or upward, or at the General, depeiiding on how the Professor moved his wrist. The Professor swung his arm violently, and the tip of the stone drew a trajectory in space. The Professor brought his arm up and down, and the tip of the stone met the friable rock of' the ledge. Then the wonder occurred: the tip struck the rock, penetrated it, scratched it, chipped it. As the Profes- sor repeated this movement over and over, the tip bit the rock and made a furrow in it, then a hole, finally a crater; it wounded, it broke, it pulverized. The General looked on wide-eyed, holding his breath. "Phenomenal!" he murmured, gulping. 63

  MISREADINGS "And that's nothing," the Professor said, with an expression of triumph. "Of course, striking the ledge with your hand alone, you would accomplish noth- ing. Now watch !" From a corner he picked up a big coconut, rough, hard, impenetrable, and handed it to the General. "Go ahead," the Professor said. "Use both hands. Break it!" "Oh, come now, Ka," the General said in a shaky voice. "You know very well that's impossible. None of us can do it . Only a dinosaur can, with a blow of his hoof. Only dinosaurs can eat the coco- nut's meat and drink its milk . " "Well, now you can, too." The Professor's voice was filled with excitement. "Watch!" He took the coconut and set it on the ledge, in the freshly dug crater, then grasped the stone at its opposite end, holding it now by the tip. His arm made a rapid swing, with no apparent effort, and the stone's thick bottom struck the nut, shattering it. The liquid poured onto the ledge, and bits of shell remained in the furrow, revealing the meat inside, white, cool, luscious. The General seized one of the pieces and greedily thrust it into his mouth. He looked at the stone, at Ka, at what until recently had been a coconut, and he seemed robbed of the power of speech. "By the Sun, Ka! This is a wonderful thing. With this Thing of yours, man has multiplied his strength a hundred times. He will be able to face any dinosaur on equal terms. He's become master of rock and 64

  The Thing trees, has gained an extra arm . . no, a hundred extra arms, an army of arms! Where did you find it?" Ka smiled smugly. "I didn't find it. I ma
de it." "Made it? What do you mean?" "I mean, it didn't exist before." "You're crazy, Ka," the General said, quivering. "It must have fallen from the sky. An envoyof the Sun must have brought it here, a spirit of the air How could anybody make what does not al- ready exist?" "It's possible," Ka replied calmly. "It's possible to take a stone and strike it against another stone until you've made it the shape you want. It's possible to shape it in such a way that your hand can grasp it. And with such a stone in your hand, it's possible to make many others, even bigger, sharper. I've done it, General." The General was sweating copiously. "Why, we must tell everyone, Ka! The whole Horde must know about this. Our men will become invincible. You understand? We can take on a bear, now. A bear has claws, but we have this Thing. We can tear him to pieces before he tea's us to pieces. We can stun him, kill him. We can kill a snake, crush a tortoise, kill even . . Great Sun'! . . kill. . another man!" The General broke off, thunderstruck by this idea. Then he resumed speaking, with a cruel gleam in his eyes. "This way, Ka, we can attack the Koammm Horde. They are more numerous and stronger than us, but now we'll have them in our power. We'll 65

  MISREADINGS destroy them to the last man! Ka, Ka!" The General seized the Professor by the shoulders. "Victory is ours!" But Ka was grave, wary. He hesitated before speaking. "That's the reason I didn't want to show it to you. I realize I've made a terrible discovery. Something that will change the world. I know. I've discovered a source of frightening energy. Nothing like it has ever been seen on earth. Which is why I don't want others to know about it. With such a weapon, war would become suicide, General. The Koammm Horde would quickly learn to make it, and in the next war there would be no victors. I had conceived of this Thing as an implement of peace and progress, but now I see how dangerous it i. I'm going to destroy it." The General was beside himself. "You're out of your mind, Ka! You've no right. You scientists and your stupid scruples! For five years you've been shut up in here and you don't know what the world is like anymore. You don't know that civilization is at a turning point. If the Koammm Horde wins, it will mean the end of peace, freedom, and joy for the human race. We have a sacred duty to possess this Thing! We won't necessarily use it, Ka. So long as everyone knows we possess it. We'll ju. st, give an experimental demonstration in the presence of our enemies. Then its use will be regulated. Nobody will dare attack us. Meanwhile, we can use it to dig graves, build new caverns, break fruit, level land. But as a weapon, we only need to possess it, not use 66

  The Thing it. It's a deterrent, Ka. It'll keep those Koammm barbarians at bay for years to come. "No, no," Ka replied. "It must be destroyed." "You're a bleeding-heart liberal, Ka, and also an idiot!" The General was livid. "You're playing into their hands. You're a Koammmite sympathizer, like all intellectuals, like that bard the other day who was preaching about a union of humans. You don't be- lieve in the Sun!" Ka shuddered. He bowed his head, his eyes nar- row and sad under their bushy brows. "I knew we'd come to this. I'm no Koammmite, and you know it. But by the Fifth Rule of the Sun, I refuse to incrim- inate myself: it might bring down the wrath of the spirits on my head. You may think what you please, but the Thing does not leave this cavern!" "Yes, it does, and quickly, too, for the glory of our Horde, for the sake of civilization and prosper- ity, and for Peace," the General yelled. With his right hand he grasped the Thing, as he had seen Ka do, and brought it down, hard, with anger, with hatred, on the head of the Professor. Ka's skull split at the impact, and a stream of blood issued from his mouth. Without a moan, he slumped to the ground, reddening the rock around him. The General, awed, stared at the device he held in his hand. Then he smiled, and it was a smile of triumph, cruel, merciless. "Who's next?" he said. 67

  MISREADINGS The circle of motionless men, crouched around the great tree, fell silent, thinking. Baa, the bard, wiped away the sweat that hadpoured from his naked body during the exertion of his narration. Then he turned to the tree under which the Chief was seated and eating a thick root with evident relish. "O mighty Szdaa," he said humbly, "I trust my story was to your liking." Szdaa made a gesture of boredom. "I don't un- derstand you young people. Or maybe I'm just getting old. You have a great imagination, my boy, no two ways about that. But I don't like science fiction . . I prefer historical novels." He signaled to an old man with parchmentlike skin to come to him. "Good old Kgru," the Chief said. "You may not be a master of the New Song, but you still know how to tell stories that have some flavor. Your turn." "Yes, mighty Szdaa," said Kgru. "I will now tell you a story of love, passion, and death. It's a tale that dates back to the last century and is called The Pri- mate's Secret or The Mystery of the Missing Link. 1961 68

  Industry and Sexual Repression a Po Valley Society The following study takes as its field of investigation the urban agglomerate of Milan at the northern end of the Italian peninsula, a protectorate of the Medi- terranean Group. Milan is located at latitudes about 45 � north of the Melanesian Archipelago and 35 � south of the Nansen Archipelago in the Arctic Glacial Sea. Therefore it is more or less centrally situated as far as the civilized world is concerned; but even though it is fairly easily reached by the Inuit, it still remains outside the purview of established ethno- graphic research. I must thank Professor Korao Pal- iau of the Anthropological Institute of the Admiralty Islands for first suggesting I study Milan. Also, I was able to pursue my fildwork thanks to a generosity of the Aborigine Foundation of Tasmania, which awarded me a travel grant of twenty-four thousand dog's teeth, enough to underwrite my expenses and the purchase of required equipment. Nor could I have written up my observations with the necessary tranquillity had Mr. and Mrs. Pokanaou of Manus 69

  MISREADINGS Island not placed at my disposal a stilt house well away from the usual noise of the trepang fishermen and the copra merchants, who unfortunately have made certain areas of our once-peaceful archipelago uninhabitable. Nor could I have read my proofs and collated my bibliographical notes without the affec- tionate assistance of my wife, Aloa, always willing to interrupt her work of making pua garlands to rush to meet the mail boat, and bring to the stilt house the enormous cases of documents I regularly re- quested from the Anthropological Documentation Center of Samoa. Those cases would have been far beyond my strength. For years investigators of the daily life and tradi- tional customs of Western peoples have been guided by a priori theory, which effectively prevented the possibility of any real understanding. Dismissing Western peoples as primitive only because they prac- tice machine worship and are still far from any direct contact with nature is a prime example of the false assumptions our ancestors made about peoples of no color, particularly Europeans. Holding to the erro- neous historicist belief that in all civilizations analo- gous cultural cycles occur, the scientists thought, in examining the behavior of an Anglo-Saxon commu- nity, for example, that they were dealing simply with an earlier phase and that in the community's later development an inhabitant of, say, Glasgow would behave much like a Melanesian. We are therefore deeply indebted to the enlightened studies of Profes- sor Poa Kilipak, who essayed the concept of "cultural model" and drew her brilliant conclusions. An in- 70

  Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society habitant of Paris lives by a code of norms and habits that are part of an organic whole and constitute a given culture as valid as our own though very differ- ent. This new perception opened the way for an objective anthropological study of colorless man and an understanding of Western civilization. For--and I may be accused of cynical relativism we are in- deed dealing with a civilization, even if it does not conform to the ways of our own civilization. (Gath- ering coconuts by climbing a palm tree with bare feet is not necessarily a form of behavior superior to that of the prim!tive who travels by jet aircraft and eats fried potatoes from a plastic bag.) The methods of the new anthropology, however, can also give rise to serious misinterpretations, es- pecially when the researcher, precisely because he recognizes as an authentic culture the "model" he has investigated, bases his work on historical docu- ments produced directl
y by its natives, attempting to derive from these the characteristics of that society. 1. The Hypothesis of Dr. Dobu of Dobu (Dobu) A typical example of this "historiographic illu- sion" is furnished us,-in fact, by the village of Milan, in a book published in 1910 by Dr. Dobu of Dobu (Dobu) entitled Italian Villages and the "Risorgi- mento" Cult. In this volume the well-known scholar attempts to reconstruct the history of the peninsula from documents written by the natives. In the view of Dr. Dobu, the peninsula in the 71

  MISREADINGS course of the last century was the scene of fierce fighting aimed at bringing all the various villages under a single ruler. Some communities fought for this goal, while others opposed unification with equal ferocity. Dr. Dobu calls the former communities revolutionary or "risogimental" (a local dialect term referring perhaps to a rebirth cult, widespread in this period, surely shamanic), and the latter reactionary. This is how Dr. Dobu, in his highly individual style, distinguished more by its ornate literary quality than by any scientific precision, describes the situa- tion: A risorgimental flame burned throughout the penin- sula, but the reactionaries lay in wait, determined to keep patriots and the entire citizenry crushed beneath the heel of the Austrian. To be sure, not all the Italian states yearned for unification; but, first among them all, the kingdom of Naples was the one that held aloft the torch of freedom. According to the documents it was, in fact, the King of the Two Sicilies who founded the military academy of the Nunziatella, in whose halls were educated the fervent patriots Morelli, Silvati, Pisacane, and De Sanctis. This enlightened monarch was thus the prime mover of Italian rebirth; but in the shadows an obscure conspirator was weaving his sinister web: Mazzini, who is infrequently mentioned in the histories of the time, and then only in descriptions of the false plots he organized, always, curiously, discovered and foiled in time, so that the best and bravest patriots, cyni- 72