Odd Jobs (125 page)

This marvellous spoof (marvellously translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel) goes on and on, a bejewelled memorial to our romantic expectations of space.

The future, too, feels deromanticized: more pollution, more population, more poverty on this pooped planet. It is touching, in Mr. Hartwell’s world treasury, to discover that some of the futuristic tales now happen in the past; Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” with its omniscient government and Professorships of Applied
Compulsion, occurs in 1980, having been published in 1958. Now we know 1980 wasn’t quite like that, nor was 1984. Fritz Leiber’s parody of L. Ron Hubbard’s scientism, “Poor Superman,” locates its post-atomic-war wastelands and glitzy governmental towers in an “America approaching the end of the twentieth century,” which in 1951 must have seemed fantastically remote. Are we, as the fabled twenty-first century approaches, still innocent enough to dream of escape into either the future or the realms of other stars? Or has the future come too close to escape to, and are the stars revealed as, in all their splendor, forever out of reach?

T
RAVELS IN
H
YPERREALITY
, by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by William Weaver and others. 307 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

One way to ensure loving attention from your publisher is to write a big best-seller the first time out. In the churning wake of
The Name of the Rose
(1983), by the previously obscure Italian professor of semiotics Umberto Eco, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has brought out Eco’s amusingly brief and scholarly
Postscript to The Name of the Rose
(1984) and now a collection of Eco’s essays, entitled
Travels in Hyperreality
. Eco, it should be said, has
two
American publishers: the Indiana University Press has issued, from his more academic self,
A Theory of Semiotics
(1976),
The Role of the Reader
(1979), and
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
(1984). The general essays of
Travels in Hyperreality
verge, some of them, on the linguistically technical, and some on the fadingly topical, but the best of them recall the
jeux d’esprit
of the late Roland Barthes in his journalistic, foreword-writing mode. Eco does not quite convince us, however, as did Barthes, that he is in possession of a wholly new tool of perception, a cerebral instrument that by a quick process of reduction and reassembly gives familiar and commonplace matters a bright, freshly faceted aspect. Barthes had something of the puckish perverse, the smirk of the true provocateur, whereas Eco is relatively benign and earnest—
he is the plump, cigarette-puffing tutor who sits across from us at his littered desk and gently conveys the rueful truth that our honors thesis would be much better if he could only write it himself. Barthes’s agility was all mental; enthroned in Paris, the capital of intellection, he had no need of research or legwork, though he might strangely find himself, as if by a blink of thought, in Japan. Eco actually travels, visiting voodoo rites in the outskirts of São Paulo, sightseeing in the intellectual hinterlands of North America, and delving into some rarefied neighborhoods of history.

As an essayist Eco has two strengths, two areas where he is unusually knowledgeable and therefore especially interesting: the Middle Ages, upon which
The Name of the Rose
was an animated disquisition, and the New World, where he is a well-acclimated tourist. The title essay, the longest in this collection, ranges across the United States in search of instances of the native appetite for “the real thing” (to quote the Coca-Cola commercial) and (to quote many another) “more.” Realer than real are Disneyland, Forest Lawn, the Movieland Wax Museum, Old Beth-page Village on Long Island (where changes in sheep produced by breeders flaw the otherwise perfect reconstruction of an early-nineteenth-century farm), and three-dimensional wax versions of Leonardo’s
Last Supper
—Eco visited seven between Los Angeles and San Francisco, all of them claiming evident superiority to the fading, flaking original in Milan. In the Palace of Living Arts in Buena Park, for five dollars the dumbfounded tourist could (until 1982, when the Palace closed) view colored wax reproductions of famous marble statues like Michelangelo’s
David
and the
Venus de Milo
(her arms considerately restored) and 3-D travesties of such celebrity paintings as the
Mona Lisa
, Ingres’s
Grande Odalisque
, and Thomas Lawrence’s
Pinkie
, complete with a concealed fan stirring her silk dress. This bold, if not commercially successful, attempt to bring closer to the American citizenry the wonders of European culture—“the fetishization of art as a sequence of famous objects”—is brother, Eco suggests, to such massive conglomerate appropriations as Hearst’s San Simeon and the Ringlings’ Venetian palazzo Ca’ d’Zan in Sarasota; thence to the Getty Museum, with its authentic masterworks in a re-created Roman villa, is a short, if tastefully trodden, step. Eco is not insensitive to the pathos of our vulgar homages, the “something disarming about this search for glory via an unrequited love for the European past,” nor quite unmindful of Old World wax museums and reliquaries that also strive for what he calls
hyperreality. He takes a dainty philosophical delight in the paradoxes of such marriages of the synthetic and the actual as ecologically minded zoos and marine parks where “Nature has almost been regained, and yet it is erased by artifice precisely so that it can be presented as uncontaminated nature,” and artificial Old West towns whose fake shops sell actual goods for real money. In the entertainment industry, he tells us, “when there is a sign it seems there isn’t one, and when there isn’t one we believe that there is. The condition of pleasure is that something be faked.” He leaves few semiotic nuances of our recreational fakery unravelled, and rises to an insight into popular American theology:

We perhaps don’t need the reference to Weber’s well-worn teaching, and an American native, becoming the object of so lively and amused an anthropology, grows, like anthropologically considered natives the world over, rather restive with possible objections, such as that most of the hyperreal sites Eco surveyed are to a great extent aimed at the entertainment and edification of children. More than once, for light on our essence, he draws upon comic strips, with which he shows an encyclopedic acquaintance. Lyndon Johnson’s enormous monument to himself in Austin is likened to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, and the market for kitschy hyperreality is “the America of Linus, for whom happiness must assume the form of a warm puppy or a security blanket, the America of Schroeder, who brings Beethoven to life not so much through a simplified score played on a toy piano as through the realistic bust in marble (or rubber). Where Good, Art, Fairytale, and History, unable to become flesh, must at least become Plastic.” That hurts. Next we’ll be told that Beethoven is plastic Beethoven if played on an American piano. Eco’s tour begins with an exhilarating prospectus—“There is … an America of furious hyperreality, which is not that of Pop Art, of Mickey Mouse, or of Hollywood movies. There is another, more secret America (or rather, just as public, but snubbed by the European visitor and also by
the American intellectual).… It has to be discovered”—but ends on a sour, somewhat Marxist note: “The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.… Thus, on entering his cathedrals of iconic reassurance, the visitor will remain uncertain whether his final destiny is hell or heaven, and so will consume new promises.”

Semiology, the study of signification born from the semantic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, is limited, as a tool of cultural analysis, by its necessary focus on propaganda—that is, the loading of discourse, visual or auditory, with messages of salesmanship and social reassurance. In Barthes’s deft and beguiling essays, the “mythologies” of the French petite bourgeoisie are caught and held to analysis as they flicker past, all but subliminally, in the Paris press; he practiced an updated and more urbane version of Flaubert’s satire of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s conventional wisdom. Eco, as he reads the Italian newspapers of the Seventies and Eighties, finds grimmer matter—the death of Aldo Moro, the barbarities of the Red Brigades. In “Striking at the Heart of the System,” Eco concludes that the terrorists’ mythology, which he couches in rather recondite comic-strip terms—“their Disney-like mythology, in which on one side there was a wicked individual capitalist named Uncle Scrooge and on the other the Beagle Boys, a cheating rabble, true, but with a certain charge of crazy amiability because they stole, to the tunes of proletarian confiscation, from the stingy, egotistical capitalist”—has become obsolete, because Uncle Scrooge has gone multinational, and “the system” is now “headless and heartless.” As such, it displays “an incredible capacity for healing and stabilizing,” and “manages things in such a way that, except for the inevitable outsiders, everybody has something to lose in a situation of generalized terrorism.” Eco, reading the signs, takes comfort in the conclusion that power has become unlocatably diffused. A photograph in
Corriere d’Informazione
shows a ski-masked terrorist brandishing his pistol alone on the street: “The collective element was missing,” Eco’s interpretation of this sign runs. “This image suggested other worlds, other figurative, narrative traditions that had nothing to do with the proletarian tradition, with the idea of popular revolt, of mass struggle.” In “Language, Power, Force,” citing Barthes, Georges Duby, and Michel Foucault, Eco proposes that power in today’s world is, like language, subject to many small adjustments but never to revolution; change expresses itself as “progressive adjustment through slow, marginal
shifts, in a centerless universe where all is margin and there is no longer any ‘heart’ of anything.”

Our world, Eco believes, resembles the medieval world, with its intricate and shifting alliances between clergy and nobility, clergy and populace, national monarchies and monastic orders. The barons of multinational capitalism are observed “to medievalize their territory, with fortified castles and great residential complexes with private guards and photoelectric cells.” Fantasy fiction and movies are riding a “neomedieval wave,” and this nostalgia, the essay “Living in the New Middle Ages” explains, is really a search for self-understanding, as we traverse our post-imperial landscape of personal insecurity, wandering thieves and mystics, plagues and massacres, monasterylike university campuses, and a gaudy artistic culture pasted together from the flotsam of the past.

Eco’s belief—easier to entertain, perhaps, in semi-anarchic, picturesque Italy than on the tame plains of the United States—that we are living in a new Middle Ages gave urgency and weight to his fourteenth-century novel, and a “coded” quality that added to its detective-story pleasures. These essays, too, take life from his historical passion, whether he is praising St. Thomas Aquinas, describing Marshall McLuhan as “someone who writes the Canticle of Sister Electricity,” or placing the Jonestown mass suicide in a dizzying context of medieval millenarian movements—the fraticelli, “the apostolics of Gherardo Segarelli, from which was born the revolt of Fra Dolcino,” the “endura,” the followers of Tanchelm and Eudes de l’Étoile, the Tafurs (hairy, dirty, cannibalistic), the Crucifers, “the secret Flagellants of Thuringia,” and so on. But our neomedieval world is also the global village of mass communication, and Eco takes as topics pop songs,
Casablanca, 2001
, how to trick the phone company and how “the system” builds such technological thievery
into its balance sheets, and the procedure whereby interest in sports becomes interest in media discourse upon sports: “Born as the raising to the nth power of that initial (and rational) waste that is sports recreation, sports chatter is the glorification of Waste, and therefore the maximum point of Consumption. On it and in it the consumer civilization man actually consumes himself.”