Prolix and protean
TURNING BACK THE CLOCK:
Hot Wars and Media Populism
By Umberto Eco (tr. by Alastair McEwen)
384 pp. Harcourt $27
Reviewed by Marty Carlock
It’s hard to know exactly how to feel about Umberto Eco. Do we marvel at his erudition? Grind our teeth at his prolixity? Admire his ability to ask questions no one else has thought of? Slump in our chairs as he waffles to the end without answering?
The subtitle of the book refers to only two of the major essays; there are 41 pieces in all, some long and some not so long. Straight off, I need to admit I am among those who found The Name of the Rose tedious. But then I found another of his novels, Bardolino, amazing, a quest narrative rich with myth, legend, phantasmagoria and historical fact, such as we know it.
Eco himself is too protean to categorize. Sometimes he rises to a statesmanlike posture. In “The Prospects for Europe,” an essay published in 2003 and included in this volume, Eco notes that America, increasingly oriented westward, is becoming a Pacific nation, not an Atlantic one—and as it does the countries of Europe will become peripheral to world power. Without actually using the word “unification,” Eco predicts that Europe must forget national autonomy and create a common defense and a common foreign policy; “Otherwise, and I mean to offend no one,” he concludes, “it will become Guatemala.”
His take on hot wars, “Some Reflections on War and Peace,” is insightful but too complicated to summarize here, except to say that Eco points out the difference between “paleowars”—the way people used to fight—and “neowars,” which is what we’re up against now. His thoughts on media populism center (at length) on the Italian scene, not so different from ours, and his disgust with the ease with which Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul and politician, can manipulate the populace.
I love all things Italian, but I’m also a connoisseur of lucid writing, and the prerequisite for clear writing is coherent thinking. Perhaps if one is a leading writer/intellectual, one is under no compunction to discipline one’s writing or one’s thinking. Eco is literate, no question—well read in the classics of the past and the absurdities of the present. But he writes like a man who has a certain (large) quota of lines to fill.
Eco’s problem? He knows too much. A given idea sends him running off in all directions, and only in the very shortest essays does his conclusion relate very much to his beginning. Here’s a sample of one of the convoluted chapters, this one entitled, “Those Who Don’t Believe in God Believe in Everything.” That aphorism, attributed to G. K. Chesterton, makes only a cameo appearance late in the article, amid many paragraphs about 1) the real beginning date of the 21st century (Jan. 1, 2001) and people’s insistence on the existence of a Year Zero; 2) Uno’s childhood calculations of how old he would have to be (68, he never thought he’d make it) to see this century; then 3) alchemy, syncretism, Isaac Newton’s belief in the occult; 4) what the discovery of America by Columbus proved; 5) Harry Potter and why it won’t produce a generation of witches and warlocks; 6) how to have a career as a clairvoyant; 7) the legend of the Templars; 8) The Da Vinci Code and the sources from which Dan Brown allegedly cribbed that book; 9) the difference between science and technology and why we can trust one and not the other; 10) the Nag Hammadi codices, the Corpus Hermeticum and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fact that the popular circulation of such documents soars whenever they are proven (yet again) to be fake; and 11) the similarities between the visions of one Sister Lucia and the book of Revelation, concluding (finally) with the observation that “each prophet sees what his culture has taught him.”
He has a sense of humor—a sardonic one, sometimes slashing straight to the core. Trouble is, to get at his one-liners we have to slog through a good deal of stuff we already know—I often scrawled “Duh!” in the margins.
On the other hand, a pretty good read, if you like sarcasm, is “The Taking of Jerusalem: An Eyewitness Report,” commissioned to commemorate the 1,000th anniversary of the Crusaders’ defeat of Muslims in that city in 1099 A.D. Eco tells it tongue in cheek, with the “broadcaster” reporting treacheries, slaughter, and bitter ironies regarding what the “Christians” said and what they did.
It’s not clear whether Eco has a regular column; these pieces have been published in a variety of Italian newspapers, and some were given as speeches. It appears that anything he wants to write/say will be published/listened to. Like every columnist who does have a regular gig, Eco falls into a sort of arrogance wherein he can reply to critics, correct complainers, and put down irritating e-mailers, always having the last public word. If we are readers of such columnists and agree with what they’re saying, this is fun to read. But it doesn’t work so well in a book.
Two other things also don’t work so well: many of the essays are as dated as last week’s newsmagazine (some as old as the 1990s), and many of his examples are drawn from Italian politics. I wasn’t sorry to learn more about the controversial Berlusconi, because I had heard his name. I wasn’t sorry to see how some thinking Europeans perceive us. But I needed things explained—translations, footnotes, glossaries, something!
After discussing Bin Laden, fundamentalism in various times and places, theocracies, integralism, and racism, Eco dodges and weaves with: “It could be said that with these few notes I have not helped clarify ideas so much as confuse them.” Yes! say I. Then he goes on: “But I’m not the one who confuses ideas; we have merely discussed ideas that are confused.” How can you argue with a guy like that?
About halfway through this collection it occurred to me who Eco is: He is contemporary Italy’s H. L. Mencken. Perhaps a kinder, gentler Mencken: less succinct, generally less acid of tongue, but expressing the same clear-eyed and sardonic take on contemporary mores. Quite likely generations X, Y, and Z won’t know who Mencken was. But they won’t have the patience to read this book anyway.
Free-lance writer Marty Carlock has published more than 1,500 articles in thirty-plus publications on subjects ranging from art to the environment to food to sports. For eighteen years she was a regular contributor to The Boston Globe. Holder of a master’s degree in art, art history and art criticism from Mount Holyoke College, she is the author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston. At present she writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.
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