Irony is the most refined and profound rhetorical figure in the cultural history of the world. It is a figure of thought that can function as a stylistic basis of a novel, a poem, a play.
Numero Zero is the latest novel by Umberto Eco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, USA and Harvill Secker, GB, English translation by Richard Dixon*): a wise and sharp operetta about Italy, narrated in a short, flowing way and with an impeccable, cultured and witty style without pedantry. Its dry and elegant narrative structure could be taken as a manual of style to understand how serious irony can be when it comes to account for Italian flawed society. Flawless is, on the contrary, the narrative structure with its witty and smooth language which conveys the idea of a society where fair play and search for clarity are mere illusions (is there a country where they are not?). Many Italian readers found the story well structured and articulated from beginning to end, but did not feel actually intrigued by the plot, seen as a simplified attempt at depicting a society that adds little more to what we already know. However, the reader is led with a coherent thread: linguistic, stylistic, formal, historical, cultural irony which Eco employs as an instrument to talk about today’s Italy. If anything there is to complain upon, it is that the novel goes so much straight to the point that a reader used to Eco’s flowing works would rather be surprised at the slim plot and the jibe of its prose.
If many readers found the slim and bitterish Numero Zero somewhat disappointing compared to the great, copious and detailed narratives he had accustomed us to, it seems to me that this is rather an exercise of style closer to his semiotic and textual analysis than to the novel as an overflowing storytelling. Numero Zero is moreover a satirical formalisation of a simple concept: if you want to write a novel plenty of facts, events, implications and characters, you can do that and be stylistically accurate and formally more coherent than Dan Brown. To put it in other words: good language, elegance and economy of form are much better than a maelstrom of narrative devices with nothing inside except some misleading theories (there’s an implied ironical remark in Eco’s way of mocking Dan Brown with his Sion’s Priory when the Italian author makes a list of the Orders of Malta). It can be counterintuitive that writing such a concise story with such an elegant and structured language is not an easy task. Actually, you need a great deal of experience and a mastery that can be achieved after years and years of writing practice in a country where there is nothing new to facts which are part of the mainstream culture (and bad conscience). If it is a matter of reconstructing the facts of the last fifty years (going backward from 1992) with all the paranoia implied and displayed (there is a word in Italian that fits perfectly with this: dietrologia of which Don De Lillo provides an interesting analysis in Underworld), the enterprise can result in a historical overview with little room for other than a fierce, ruthless, merciless irony to show the way we can look at those facts from our world of today. An irony that strikes in part the facts and misdeeds of the last fifty years recounted as the story of a paranoid, but that casts a shadow over the years from 1992 onward to our gloomy, shallow and cynical 2000s and 2010s (that obviously do not appear but of which we are well aware as readers of recent memory).
It is the year 1992, Milan. Colonna, the narrator, is a hack, translator and ghost writer in his fifties who defines himself, with a horrible yet standard word for people of this type in English, a loser. He dreams of “what all the losers dream, to write one day a book that would give [him] glory and richness”. One day Colonna is hired to be part of the editorial team in a project whose director is a certain Simei, of whom “you could not remember the face because it seemed like someone else who wasn’t him” (I love this description… by the way). The newspaper that should come out of the project, but that perhaps will never do, is financed by a “Commendatore” (some sort of honorary title once very popular and misused in Italy for important and socially respectable people, generally respectable only for some remnants of Borbonic society that anybody with some intelligence would laugh at) who wants to enter the “high, respectable society” of wealthy poppies with a newspaper willing to “tell the truth about everything” and thus blackmail those who, to silence any scandals, would ask the Commendatore to give up the idea in exchange for a permission (and a rich exchange of shareholdings) to enter the parlor. Colonna’s colleagues are Maia, a smart and witted journalist, but perceived by the paranoid Braggadocio as an autistic; Braggadocio, an obsessive paranoid who is carrying on a research on Mussolini’s last days and on the possibility that there was a double in his place that still infests the imagination of a certain Italy; Lucidi, an in-between who maybe worked for the secret service; Palatino, a proofreader whose work was no longer necessary in a world where spelling is happily mistaken, and Cambria who spent the nights in police stations to sniff at the fresh news and who arrived at Domani (the puns that Italian language can make with the newspaper title are countless – Domani /Tomorrow).
Through a parody of fair journalism and its ethics, Eco offers a decidedly fierce picture of the last twenty-five years in Italy, through a narrative strategy of shifting backward but not forward, creating a historical absence (from 1992 to 2015 many things happened and yet the country is even worse than it was back in 1992). In fact, by setting the story immediately after the scandal of Pio Albergo Trivulzio and with the investigation called “Clean Hands” at the door, it not only succeeds in repositioning the point of view so as to highlight the media, cultural and, as always, implicitly and explicitly political context of Italy, but, in so doing, it also triggers a game of recognition with the reader and his recent (or almost recent) historical memory.
The interesting aspect of the book is twofold: on the one hand, it is a successful experiment that is not experimental in form; genres are implied formally (thriller, historical facts, comedy, obsessive descriptions, noir) with an elegant style and the limpid, cultivated language that is never affected. A challenge easily won because Eco is a refined connoisseur of both his language and the styles used in literature (high, medium or low) and manages to make fun of Italian language abusers who affect a style without truly having any knowledge of its potentialities.
The small and large stratagems of the various genres, noir, historical, sentimental, Italian comedy are weaved with lightness, skill and economy of means, all characteristics that are now applied to consumer books published today but with less effective results. Memorable are the editorial meetings to decide the language and the words to exclude in the pieces of Domani, preferring in this way a clumsy, falsified, mystified language that, in Simei’s point of view, should reflect readers’ tastes.
On the other hand, there is the interesting aspect of characters who define themselves as losers. Eco goes to pick them up right among those types who swarms at the margins of the cultural industry and that today we can define as intellectual proletariat (Bianciardi’s Bitter Life is a serious although ironic example of this type of jobs in the Sixties, today it is even worse in Italy): ghost writers, editors at the service of a newspaper of low profile, people who get by producing a mistreated intellectual work for gossip magazines, which they themselves despise, and which nowadays is consumed distractedly like a sandwich on the go, or from the screen of a mobile phone, between a bus stop and an underground station.
Numero Zero rests on a distance that is filled with implicit and explicit bitterness, not differently from the bitterness found at the basis of satire as genre (the bitterness, detachment and disenchantment are integral parts of authentic satire) and shows itself in the words of his favourite characters (Maia and Colonna) as a sense of cultural defeat that has affected everybody and everything: the country, politics, hope, decency. Even exile or escape can’t give relief because, despite scandals, corruption and indecency are openly visible in certain countries and more recognizable and transparent (even in this case Maia’s considerations appear as a cynicism that is the last resort of desperate souls), and therefore in some way more acceptable, Colonna unmasks the illusion behind it. When Maia proposes to move to a country in South America where
“you know who belongs to the drug cartel, who directs the revolutionary gangs, you sit in the restaurant, a group of friends passes by and introduce you to a guy who is the boss of some arms smuggling business, all are beautiful, shaved and scented[…].Those are countries without mysteries, everything takes place in the sunlight, the police claim to be corrupt by regulation, government and underworld coincide by constitutional dictates, the banks live on money laundering “.
Colonna answers:
“You’re not considering that even Italy is slowly becoming like those dream countries in which you want to be exiled. We are getting used to losing the sense of shame. Did you not see how all the interviewees tonight told quietly that they had done this or that, and almost expected a medal? No more shades in baroque, things from Counter-Reformation, the traffics will emerge en plein air, as if they were painted by the Impressionists: authorized corruption, the mafia officially in parliament, tax evaders in government, and in jail only the Albanian thieves of chickens. People will well continue to vote for the rogues because they will not believe in the BBC; or they will see programmes such as those of tonight because they will be glued to something more trash, perhaps Vimercate’s teleshopping will end in the early evening. If they kill someone important – state funerals. You just have to wait: once we have finally become the third world, our country will be fully livable as if everything were Copacabana la donna è regina la donna è sovrana. [….] Life is bearable, one only has to settle for.”
THat’s the point for irony: because life is (un)bearable after all. You just have to make do with what you have. Or do you?
* The quotations in English are my translation from the Italian original version because I did not have the English version of the book. I apologise for any mistakes.
La lettrice immaginaria 