Christmas 1963<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Dear Stefano,<\/p>\n
Christmas is coming and soon the shops in the city centre (and those in the suburbs, of course) will be packed with excited fathers ready to play their part in the annual comedy of generosity. They have been waiting with hypocritical joy for that moment when they can buy themselves their favourite toys: train sets, puppet theatres, archery sets and home ping-pong tables, while pretending they are gifts for their children. I\u2019ll just be looking on, because this year it\u2019s still not my turn. You\u2019re still too little, and Montessori-inspired toys don\u2019t really do anything for me, maybe because I don\u2019t get any fun out of putting them in my mouth, even though the instructions say they can\u2019t be swallowed whole. No, I must wait for two, three, maybe four years. Then it\u2019ll be my turn, maternal education will be a thing of the past, the twilight of the teddy bear age will come, and it will be time for me, with the delightful, sacrosanct violence of paternal authority, to mould your social consciousness. And then, Stefano…<\/p>\n
Then I\u2019ll give you guns. Double-barrelled shotguns. Repeaters. Submachine guns, cannons. Bazookas, sabres. Armies of toy soldiers in full battle gear. Castles with drawbridges. Forts to besiege. Pillboxes, powder magazines, battleships, jets. Machine guns, daggers, revolvers. Colts, Winchesters, Rifles, Chassepots, bolt-action 91s, Garands, howitzers, culverins, longbows, slingshots, crossbows, swords, pikes, halberds and grappling irons; and Captain Flint\u2019s pieces of eight (in memory of Long John Silver and Ben Gunn). Cutlasses, the kind preferred by Don Barrejo, and blades of Toledo steel capable of brushing aside three pistols and slaying the Marquis of Montelimar, or the Neapolitan feint, with which the Baron de Sigognac ran through the first bravo who tried to kidnap his Isabella; and then battle-axes, partisans, misericords, krises, javelins, scimitars and crossbow bolts and sword sticks, like the one that got John Carradine electrocuted when it touched the live rail, and it\u2019s your tough luck if you don\u2019t remember that. Cutlasses that would make Carmaux and Wan Stiller turn pale, finely chased pistols that Sir James Brook had never possessed (otherwise he wouldn\u2019t have given in before the sardonic Portuguese\u2019s umpteenth cigarette); and stilettos with triangular blades, with which, as the day was gently dying at Clignancourt, Sir William\u2019s disciple slew the assassin Zampa, who had killed his own mother, the sordid old dame Fripart. And choke pears, one of those torture instruments crammed into the jailer La Ram\u00e9e\u2019s mouth as the Duc de Beaufort, the coppery hairs of his beard made even more attractive by lengthy brushing with a lead comb, galloped off joyfully looking forward to Mazarin\u2019s wrath; and muzzles loaded with nails to be fired by men with teeth reddened by betel nut: and muskets with mother-of-pearl stocks, to be wielded astride Arab chargers with glossy coats and sinewy hocks; lightning fast longbows of the sort that made the Sherriff of Nottingham green with envy, and scalping knives, like the one used by Minnehaha or (since you\u2019re bilingual) Winnetou. Small, flat pistols, to be tucked into a gentleman thief\u2019s morning suit, or heavy lugers that make a bulge in pockets or armpits, in the style of Michael Shayne. And more rifles. Rifles, rifles like Ringo\u2019s, like Wild Bill Hickok\u2019s or muzzle loaders like Sambigliong\u2019s. In short, weapons, my boy, lots of weapons, only weapons. That\u2019s what you\u2019ll be getting every Christmas.<\/p>\n
I am surprised, Sir \u2013 they\u2019ll tell me \u2013 you who campaign for nuclear disarmament and flirt with peace councils, you who go on marches and cultivate the Aldermaston mystique. That surprises you, does it? \u201cDo I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself\u201d (as Walt Whitman said). But I\u2019m not contradicting myself, I know what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n
It happened one morning, I had promised a friend\u2019s son I would get him a present, and I went into a big department store in Frankfurt to ask for a nice revolver. Scandalized looks ensued. We don\u2019t sell war toys, sir. Such froideur<\/em>.<\/p>\n Mortified, I left and bumped right into two soldiers of the Bundeswehr who were passing by. I returned to reality. No one was going to fool me anymore, from then on, I would go solely by personal experience and to blazes with the pedagogues.<\/p>\n My childhood was strongly, exclusively warlike: I fired makeshift blowpipes from among the bushes, I squatted behind the few parked cars around in those days and fired my repeater, I led bayonet charges, I threw myself into the bloodiest of battles. At home, nothing but toy soldiers. Entire armies, deployed in extenuating manoeuvres, operations that lasted weeks, extremely long cycles in which I mobilized even the remains of my teddy bear and my sister\u2019s dolls. I organized bands of adventurers, I had my few faithful minions call me \u201cthe terror of Piazza Genova\u201d (now Piazza Matteotti); I disbanded the \u201cBlack Lions\u201d to merge with a more powerful gang, within which I then organized a pronunciamiento with disastrous results. When I was evacuated to Monferrato I was forcibly recruited by the Stradino gang and subjected to an initiation ceremony consisting of one hundred kicks in the backside and three hours of imprisonment in a chicken coop. We fought against the Rio Nizza gang, who were filthy dirty and really scary. The first time I was afraid and ran away, the second time I was hit on the lip by a stone and to this day I have a sort of nodule inside that I can feel with my tongue. (Then the real war came along, the partisans would let us hold their Sten guns for a couple of seconds; not that we wanted them anymore after we saw a few of their dead with holes in their foreheads. But by then we were becoming adults and we\u2019d roam along the banks of the Belbo to catch eighteen-year-olds making love, unless we were in the throes of our first religious crises.)<\/p>\n From this orgy of wargames there emerged a man who managed to do eighteen months of national service without touching a gun while devoting the long hours in the barracks to a rigorous study of medieval philosophy; a man who has been guilty of much iniquity but who has never been guilty of the sad crime of loving weapons. A man who understands the value of armies only when he sees soldiers slogging through the mire of Vajont to rescue the victims of the disaster, a serene and noble vocation. And I think I owe this profound, systematic, cultivated and documented horror of war to the healthy, innocent and platonically bloody release afforded by childhood games, just as you come out of a western film (after an epic brawl of the kind where the walls of the saloon collapse, tables and big mirrors are broken, someone shoots at the piano player and windows are smashed) feeling cleaner, well disposed and relaxed, ready to smile at the passer-by who bumps into you or to rescue baby sparrows fallen from the nest \u2013 as Aristotle knew well, when he required tragedy to wave the red banner of blood before our eyes to purify us with the divine purgative of catharsis.<\/p>\n I imagine, instead, Eichmann\u2019s childhood. Lying face downwards, that look of death\u2019s bookkeeper on his face as he puzzles over his Meccano, following the instructions in the manual, avidly opening the multicoloured box of his chemistry set, sadistically arranging the tools of his Young Carpenter set with its tiny plane and twenty-centimetre saw on a piece of plywood. Beware the boys who construct model cranes! In their cold and twisted minds these junior mathematicians are repressing the atrocious complexes that will trouble their mature years. In every little monster working the points of his toy train set I see the future commandant of the death camps! And look out if they like to collect model cars, those perfect facsimiles that the ghastly toy industry offers them complete with boots that really open and windows that roll up and down \u2013 scary stuff. A terrifying plaything for the future sergeants of an electronic army who will hit the nuclear button without batting an eyelid!<\/p>\n You can already spot them now. Property speculators, the Rachmanist landlords who specialize in midwinter evictions, men whose personality was formed by that infamous game, \u201cMonopoly\u201d, which accustomed them to the idea of property trading and the free and easy sale of share packages. These latter day P\u00e8res Grandet acquired their taste for accumulation and stock exchange coups with bingo cards. Bureaucrats of death brought up on Meccano, moribund bureaucrats whose spiritual death began with the files and the stamps of the Little Post Office…<\/p>\n And the future? What will happen to children when the industrialized Christmas brings them American dolls that talk and sing and move, Japanese robots that jump and dance thanks to a seemingly inexhaustible battery, radio-controlled cars whose workings will always be mysterious…<\/p>\n Stefano, my boy, I will give you guns. Because a gun isn\u2019t a game. It\u2019s the cue for a game. From this you will have to invent a situation, a set of relationships, a dialectic of events. You\u2019ll have to imitate the sound of gunshots and shout bang, bang, and you\u2019ll find out that a game is as good as what you put into it, not for what you find ready-made. You\u2019ll imagine destroying the enemy, and you\u2019ll satisfy an ancestral drive that no tedious civilization will ever blunt, unless it turns you into a neurotic in line for the company Rorschach test. But you\u2019ll end up convinced that destroying the enemy is a convention of play, a game among other games, and so you\u2019ll learn that it is extraneous to reality, whose limits you\u2019ll learn through play. It will rid you of anger and repressions, and you\u2019ll be ready to receive other messages, which contemplate neither death nor destruction. The important thing is that death and destruction will always strike you as fantasy elements, like fairies and the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, which we have all known and hated without this leading to any irrational hatred of German shepherds. But maybe this isn\u2019t the whole story, nor will it be the whole story. I won\u2019t allow you to blaze away with your Colts only to let off steam, or to purify your primordial instincts through play, leaving the pars construens<\/em>, the communication of values, until later. I shall try to give you ideas even as you shoot hunkered down from behind an armchair. For a start I won\u2019t let you fire on the Indians. I\u2019ll teach you to fire on the gun runners and whisky traders who are destroying Indian reservations. And you\u2019ll shoot at the slaveowners of the South, so it\u2019s understood you\u2019re Lincoln\u2019s man. I will not teach you to fire on Congolese cannibals, but on ivory merchants, and in a moment of weakness maybe I\u2019ll teach you how to make a stew out of Mr Livingstone, I presume. We\u2019ll play Arabs against Lawrence, who has never struck me as a fine model of virility for well brought up youngsters, and if we play at Romans we\u2019ll be on the side of the Gauls, who were Celts like us Piedmontese and cleaner than that Julius Caesar \u2013 a man you will soon learn to look upon with mistrust, because you can\u2019t take away the freedoms of a democratic community and then, by way of a posthumous tip, leave people a few gardens in which to stroll. We\u2019ll side with Sitting Bull against that repugnant individual, General Custer. And we\u2019ll be on the side of the Boxers, of course, and on Fant\u00f4mas\u2019s side rather than Inspector Juve\u2019s, as the latter was too much of a cop to refuse to beat up an Algerian if the occasion demanded it. But I\u2019m joking: I\u2019ll certainly teach you that Fant\u00f4mas was a baddie, but as I\u2019m no accomplice of that corrupter of innocent kids, Baroness Orczy, I won\u2019t be telling you that the Scarlet Pimpernel was a hero. He was a dirty Vendean who caused problems for the good Danton and the purest of the pure, Robespierre, and if we play that game you can take part in the taking of the Bastille.<\/p>\n They\u2019ll be great games, just think, and we\u2019ll play them together! Ah, you wanted us to eat cake? Come on then, Monsieur Santerre, let the drums roll, tricoteuses<\/em> of the world unite and let those needles rip! Today we play the decapitation of Marie Antoinette! But this is perverse pedagogy! Who said that? You, sir, who are making a film about the hero, Fra Diavolo, a brigand if ever there was one in the pay of the landowners and the Bourbons? Ah, a fine education you\u2019re giving these children! But you, have you<\/em> ever taught your son to play at being Carlo Pisacane, or have you allowed elementary schoolteachers and the poetaster Mercantini to pass him off in the eyes of our children as a kind but idiotic blond whose works are to be learned by rote? And you, you who have been an anti-Fascist from birth we might say, have you ever played at partisans with your son? Have you ever crouched down behind the bed pretending to be in the valleys of Piedmont and shouting look out, a roundup, a roundup, shoot, shoot the Nazis?! You give your son building blocks and send him with the maid to see racist films that glorify the destruction of the Indian nations. So, dear Stefano, I\u2019ll give you guns. And I\u2019ll teach you some very complicated war games, in which the truth is never on one side only. You\u2019ll let off steam, in the years of your youth, your ideas will get a little muddled, but you will gradually form certain convictions. Then, as an adult, you\u2019ll think that it was all a fairy tale: Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sandokan, the rifles, the cannons, hand-to-hand combat, the witch and the seven dwarfs, armies against other armies. But if, by chance, when you\u2019re grown up and the monstrous figures of your childhood dreams are still around, witches, goblins, armies, bombs, national service, maybe, after having developed a critical attitude towards fairy tales, you will have acquired a similar approach to reality.<\/p>\n So, for this year, Merry Christmas. I\u2019ll buy you a game of little concentric circles that will, perhaps, initiate you into the mysteries of topology.<\/p>\n"}],"edizione":"N\u00b0 6, 1963","custom_sticky":false,"autore":[{"ID":140,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2019-04-08 15:32:02","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-08 15:32:02","post_content":"\r\n Author, linguist and semiologist (1936-2016), he was one of Italy\u2019s most internationally-renowned intellectuals. Graduated in Philosophy from the University of Turin with a thesis on Thomas Aquinas, following a period in rai as a scriptwriter, he published his essay The Open Work <\/em>(1962), followed by Apocalypse Postponed <\/em>(1963). Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna from 1971, he was one of the supporters of the first course in Art, Music and Performance Disciplines (dams) in the same university. In 1980 he received international acclaim with the publication of his worldwide best-seller The Name of the Rose<\/em>, followed by Foucault\u2019s Pendulum <\/em>in 1988. His other successful publications include: Misreadings <\/em>(1963); Lector in fabula <\/em>(1979); Kant and the Platypus <\/em>(1997).<\/p>\r\n","post_title":"Umberto Eco","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"umberto-eco-2","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-04-15 16:51:51","post_modified_gmt":"2019-04-15 16:51:51","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/internal-pcons-be-fondazione-fr-dev-elb-1449244171.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com\/?post_type=autori&p=140","menu_order":0,"post_type":"autori","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/selezione_antologica\/3449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/selezione_antologica"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/selezione_antologica"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}