Inventing the Enemy: Essays (32 page)
Read Inventing the Enemy: Essays Online
Authors: Umberto Eco
Matex Security has been in existence since 1982 to protect your property. With made-to-measure furniture for the home, with secret compartments to hide your valuables and documents, where no intruder will ever find them even if they search your whole house or offices or boats of whatever make or model. These works are carried out in the greatest confidentiality and made to the specifications and instructions of the client, built exclusively by our cabinetmaker and our highly dependable staff.
Some time ago, I wrote that technology moves like a crayfish, in other words, backwards.
1
A century after wireless telegraphy revolutionized communications, the Internet has reestablished a telegraphy that runs on (telephone) wires. Videocassettes (which are analog) enabled film buffs to explore a film step by step, moving backward and forward and discovering all the secrets of how it was put together, whereas DVDs (which are digital) allow us only to jump from chapter to chapter, in other words, only by macro-leaps. High-speed trains now take us from Milan to Rome in three hours, while flying there, all in all, takes at least three and half. It is not so extraordinary, then, that even politics and government communication techniques should return to the times of the horse-drawn carriage, meetings in the steam room of a Turkish bath, or messages left in an alcove by some Mata Hari.
[Reworking of two articles that appeared in
Libération
(December 2, 2010) and
L’Espresso
(December 31, 2010).]
1. Edited by Leonard C. Lewin (New York: The Dial Press, 1967).
***
1. Giacomo Leopardi,
L’infinito,
c. 1819—translation by Jonathan Galassi.
***
2. Eugenio Lecaldano,
Un’etica senza Dio
(Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006).
***
1. “In generatione animalis et hominis in quibus est forma perfectissima, sunt plurimae formae et generationes intermediae, et per consequens corruptiones, quia generatio unius est corruptio alterius. Anima igitur vegetabilis, quae primo inest, cum embryo vivit vita plantae, corrumpitur, et succedit anima perfectior, quae est nutritiva et sensitiva simul, et tunc embryo vivit vita animalis; hac autem corrupta, succedit anima rationalis ab extrinseco immissa, licet praecedentes fuerint virtute seminis.”
***
1. For the story of this reply and the justifications that followed it, see
Hugo, Hélas!
by André Gide, edited by Claude Martin (Paris: Éditions Fata Morgana, 2002).
***
2. Jean Cocteau,
Le mystère laïc,
in
Oeuvres complètes,
vol. 10 (Lausanne: Maguerat, 1946), p. 21.
***
3. Umberto Eco, “Casablanca, o la rinascita degli dei,” in
Dalla periferia dell’impero
(Milan: Bompiani, 1977), pp. 138–46.
***
4. “Elogio del Montecristo,” in
Sugli specchi e altri saggi
(Milan: Bompiani, 1985), pp. 147–58.
***
5. Victor Brombert,
Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
***
6. Karl Marx,
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
translated by Eden and Cedar Paul (1926).
***
7. Georg Lukács,
The Historical Novel
, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1962).
***
1.
Translator’s note:
The word
casino
in Italian is in effect two words, with two pronunciations—a
casinò,
with the accent on the final syllable, is the same as the English casino, or gambling house; but here we are concerned with the other word
casino,
pronounced, confusingly, with the stress on the penultimate syllable in exactly the same way as the English word.
***
2. Now that we have established what
veline
originally were, I can explain how the word came to take on its present meaning. When Antonio Ricci started the television entertainment show
Striscia la notizia
in the 1990s, he wanted some girls, usually appearing on roller-skates, to bring messages for the two presenters, and he called them
veline.
But the choice is very significant; it means that when Ricci created
Striscia la notizia,
the fact that he could make a joke out of the word
veline
indicated there was still an audience that remembered and knew what the
veline
sent out by the MinCulPop were. If no one knows this today, it is another reflection that can be made on “noise,” on the superimposition of information: in the space of two decades one notion is canceled out because it has been taken over by the obsessive use of another.
***
3.
Translator’s note:
Silvio Berlusconi appeared as guest at a girl’s eighteenth-birthday party in April 2009, prompting his wife to file for divorce.
***
1.
Translator’s note:
An imaginary island in Emilio Salgari’s novels.
***
2. Renato Giovannoli,
Scienza della fantascienza
(Milan: Bompiani, 1991).
***
3. According to a recent hypothesis, yet to be proved, tachyons could exist—as neutrinos.
***
4. Hans Hörbiger,
Glazial-Kosmogonie
(Leipzig: Kaiserslautern Hermann Kaysers, 1913).
***
5. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier,
Le matin des magiciens
(Paris: Gallimard, 1960). The book was translated into English in 1963.
***
6. In fact, it was Rudolf Elmayer-Vestenbrugg, in
Die Welteislehre nach Hanns Hörbiger
(Leipzig: Koehler Amelang, 1938).
***
7. For example, René Alleau,
Hitler et les sociétés secrètes
(Paris: Grasset, 1969), or Giorgio Galli,
Hitler e il nazismo magico
(Milan: Rizzoli, 1989).
***
8. For example, Gerard Kuiper, of the Mount Palomar Observatory, in an article that appeared in
Popular Astronomy
in 1946, and Willy Ley, who had worked on the V-1 in Germany, in his article “Pseudoscience in Naziland,” in
Astounding Science Fiction
vol. 39 (1947).
***
1. This collage contains passages, in the following order, from Alexandre Dumas, Ponson du Terrail, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Xavier de Montépin, Victor Hugo, Dumas again, and Carolina Invernizio.
***
1.
Translator’s note:
Fascist organizations of workers and employers.
***
2. Apart from passages that link paragraphs, the various judgments are taken from articles that appeared in the 1920s and ’30s, in the following order: (1.) Carlo Linati, “Joyce,” in
Corriere della Sera,
August 20, 1925; (2.) Report on reading the manuscript of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
1916; (3.) Santino Caramella, “Anti-Joyce,” in
Il Baretti,
vol. 12, 1926; (4.) Valentino Piccoli, “Ma Joyce chi è?” in
L’Illustrazione Italiana,
vol. 10, 1927, and “Il romanzo italiano del dopoguerra,” in
La Parola e il Libro,
vol. 4, 1927; (5.) Guido Piovene, “Narratori,” in
La Parola e il Libro,
vols. 9–10, 1927; (6.) Curzio Malaparte, “Strapaese e stracittà,” in
Il Selvaggio,
vol. 4, no. 20, 1927; (7.) G. B. Angioletti, “Aura poetica,” in
La Fiera Letteraria,
July 7, 1929; (8.) Elio Vittorini, “Joyce e Rabelais,” in
La Stampa,
August 23, 1929; (9.) Elio Vittorini, “Letteratura di psicoanalisi,” in
La Stampa,
September 27, 1929; (10.) Luciano Anceschi, “Romanzo collettivo o romanzo collettivista,” in
L’Ambrosiano,
May 17, 1934 (in consideration of the man who was to become the leading light behind some of the most radical movements in postwar Italian culture, we should not forget that he was twenty-three at the time, and only ten when Fascism had begun to educate him); (11.) Vitaliano Brancati, “I romanzieri europei leggano romanzi italiani,” in
Scrittori nostri
(Milan: Mondadori, 1935); (12.) Mario Praz, “Commento a
Ulysses,
” in
La Stampa,
August 5, 1930; (13.) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti et al.,
Il romanzo sintetico,
1939 (now in
Teoria e invenzione futurista
[Milan: Mondadori, 1968]); (14.) Ennio Giorgianni, “Inchiesta su James Joyce,” in
Epiloghi di Perseo,
vol. 1, 1934; (15.) Renato Famea, “Joyce, Proust, e il romanzo moderno,” in
Meridiano di Roma,
April 14, 1940; (16.) Mario Pannunzio, “Necessità del romanzo,” in
Il Saggiatore,
June 1932; (17.) Giuseppe Biondolillo, “Giudaismo letterario,” in
L’Unione Sarda,
April 14, 1939.
For all of these sources I am indebted to Giovanni Cianci,
La fortuna di Joyce in Italia
(Bari: Adriatica, 1974).
***
1. Tarcisio Lancioni,
Almanacco del bibliofilo—Viaggio tra gli isolari
(Milan: Rovello, 1992).
***
2. On this whole question, see Arturo Graf,
Miti, leggende, e superstizioni del Medio Evo,
chapter 4 (Turin: Loescher, 1892–93).
***
3. Although a great deal was written at the time about Powder of Sympathy, in particular in the writings of Sir Kenelm Digby (for example,
Theatrum sympatheticum, in quo Sympathiae Actiones variae, singulares & admirandae tàm Macro—quam Microcosmicae exhibentur, & Mechanicé, Physicé, Mathematicé, Chimicé & Medicé, occasione Pulveris Sympathetici, ita quidem elucidantur, ut illarum agendi vis & modus, sine qualitatum occultarum, animaeve Mundi, aut spiritus astralis Magnive Magnalis, vel aliorum Commentariorum subsidium ad oculum pateat
[Nuremberg, 1660], the story about the dog is perhaps legendary. More recent references to it include Dava Sobel,
Longitude
(New York: Penguin, 1995).
***
1.
Turning Back the Clock
(New York: Harcourt, 2007).