Adventures in Pop Culture
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction Adventures in Pop Culture By Brooke Allen Although Umberto Eco has certainly proved himself as a novelist-The Name of the Rose'was one of the major bestsellers of the 1980s-he has...
...It is, to say the least, an interesting time to be there...
...Recently invaded by Napoleon, Spain is being modernized rapidly and, somewhat against its will, forced to accept a liberal constitution based on the principles of the French Revolution...
...The headlines announce each Fascist defeat as though it were a victory, the masterpiece of this genre being the Corriere della Sera's of June 7,1944: German DEFENSIVE FIREPOWER POUNDS ALLIED FORCES ALONG NORMANDY coast-this is how Italian newspaper readers learned about the Allied invasion of Normandy...
...Gray Wolf is captured and turns out to be a woman, half-Spanish, halfShoshone...
...And personal memory, of course, contains the essence of the self...
...In a homelier metaphor, "I'm holding a long note," Yambo says, "like a stuck record, and since I can't remember the opening notes, I can't finish the song...
...Alejandro is a good man but unimaginative, the positive side, it might be said, of colonialism...
...The changes these two centuries have brought are truly shocking...
...But Eco, a noted semiotician at the University of Bologna, also frequently descends to a more generally accessible level to communicate his thoughts on history, philosophy, and the patterns as well as significance of contemporary culture...
...The world is different, though, for his son Diego...
...For more than 80 years Zorro has been perennially popular...
...There was now a building for the meetings of the alcalde and the councilman, which also acted as a courthouse and theater where light operas, moralistic plays, and patriotic ceremonies were presented...
...Now 60ish-the novel is set in 1991, with the first bombs falling on Iraq-Yambo awakens from a coma and discovers that he has lost his memory...
...And here are the slave traders of the time, transporting their cargo across the Atlantic: "There were two methods of transport among the slave traders, fardos prietos and fardos flojos...
...Even more bizarre is a children's newspaper: "Without in any way distinguishing one from the other, the Coirierino spoke of Fascist glories and of fantasy worlds inhabited by grotesque fairy-tale characters...
...Did I identify back then with those Italian boys...
...You read any old story as a child, and you cultivate it in your memory, transform it, exalt it, sometimes elevating the blandest thing to the status of myth," he comments acutely...
...It offered me stories and serious cartoons of absolute Fascist orthodoxy alongside paneled pages that were, by all appearances, American in origin.' Examining the material along with contemporary newspapers, Yambo becomes, as his grandfather had been, a master at reading between the lines...
...Travels in Hyperreality (1986), a nonfiction work, brilliantly anatomized aspects of American life that exposed our essential schizophrenia...
...Troubled by the baroque, violent, sometimes disturbingly sexual imagery of this material, Yambo feels he had been raised in a "cult of horror": "If I had read all those stories, if I had really seen all those cover images, how could I have accepted that springtime comes a-singing...
...The story opens in 1790, at the San Gabriel Mission in Alta California, near the one-horse burg of Pueblo de los Angeles with its sinister natural tar pits...
...He was not greedy, he did not abuse power, and authority came naturally to him, but he was not a man with a grand vision...
...Finally, back in Alta California, Diego has his ultimate showdown with Moncada and fulfills his destiny as a masked hero in the service of justice...
...Even the sight of his grandchildren fails to help: "All that came to mind was there are perfumes as fresh as a child's flesh...
...Born to a halfIndian mother and possessed of an Indian "milk-brother," who was born to a household servant the day of his birth, he lives within two cultures and is initiated-without his father's knowledge-into the Shoshone tribe: his totemic animal is a fox, a "zorro...
...And indeed my head was not empty, it was a maelstrom of memories that were not mine: The marchioness went out at five o'clock in the middle of the journey of our life, Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob begat the man of La Mancha, and that was when I saw the pendulum betwixt a smile and a tear, on the branch of Lake Como where late the sweet birds sang, the snows of yesteryear softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves, messieurs les Anglais je me suis couch?© de bonne heure!' Without memory, Yambo can regain neither his soul nor his life...
...Inevitably, she and Alejandro fall in love and she is, temporarily at any rate, "reformed," accepting the settled life of a Spanish lady...
...The difference between Alejandro and his son is the difference between the dying ancien r?©gime and the brave new world of revolution and democracy...
...Did I have some instinctive ability to keep the realm of the good, domestic feelings separate from these adventure stories that spoke to me of a cruel world modeled on the Grand Guignol, that realm of the torn asunder, the flayed, the burnt at the stake, the hung...
...Yambo's archaeological exploration of his own soul via the cultural detritus of his youth is reminiscent of Dennis Potter's marvelous television series The Singing Detective...
...Here, the illustrations have grafted images onto his memory that connect with renascent personal feelings...
...Thus I decide that, if I am to escape temptation, I must avoid the suggestions of an 'education in purity': Both are the devil's stratagems, and each sustains the other...
...Sex is as confused as politics in this looking-glass world, with the sin-centered theology of the Catholic clergy jarring against the implied sexuality that permeates popular culture: Damsels in distress with exposed cleavage or thighs, scantily clad cartoon heroines, lush sirens advertising cosmetics or sweets jump out at Yambo from every illustration and begin to awaken his sense memories...
...Another popular series of the period, Italy's Boys in the World, related daring adventures featuring brave boys full of Fascist pride...
...For pure enjoyment, few novels this season will match Isabel Allende 's Zorro (HarperCollins, 390 pp., $25.95...
...Allende portrays early 19th-century Spain and America as a gorgeous and often fearsome pageant, and her novel should delight even readers who have little or no interest in reading about a cartoon "hero...
...As he sadly remarks, "I had lost my soul...
...I tell myself that it must be prohibition that kindles fantasy...
...Trying to get back to Diego's home in America, they set out across the Atlantic in a merchant ship and are captured by the famous pirate Jean Laffitte, who takes them to his headquarters in New Orleans...
...His doctor, wife and daughters ""were cramming a thousand details of my life into my head," he says, "but they were like dry beans: When you moved the pot, they slid around in there but stayed raw, not soaking up any broth or cream...
...Eco has created a hero not unlike himself who grew up during the Fascist years and World War II...
...In Augustine's formula, he reflects, we live simultaneously in three moments-expectation, attention and memoryand none of them can exist without the others...
...He has been portrayed on screen by Douglas Fairbanks Sr...
...The economy is hardly beyond the Middle Ages: Any sort of labor and business is considered beneath the dignity of a gentleman...
...He does not know his name, does not recognize his wife, does not remember his parents...
...The mission is attacked by a group of Indians with a charismatic leader, Chief Gray Wolf...
...She walks a fine line at times: Having chosen to portray Diego de la Vega, a.k.a...
...Fog, my uncontaminated sister...
...The populace, however, is arch conservative, attached to the autocratic Bourbon monarchy and the equally autocratic Catholic Church...
...The poverty and injustice are appalling...
...Since then, Yambo has owned the Solana house but avoided it, possibly because of the potency of the memories he is now, ironically, seeking to regain...
...Diego, on the contrary, is to devote his life to impartial, democratic justice-fraternity and equality in the words of the French revolutionaries or, in that of his tribe, okahue...
...My soul was wiping the streetcar windows so it could drown in the moving fog of the headlamps...
...But it is only when Yambo begins to connect the words and images of the popular literature with the political events of the time that he delves into the emotional and philosophical disconnection of his early world...
...Many years before, when Yambo was still a teenager, his parents were killed in a car accident and his grandfather soon died of a heart attack, depriving him in one traumatic blow of most of his kin...
...On Fiction Adventures in Pop Culture By Brooke Allen Although Umberto Eco has certainly proved himself as a novelist-The Name of the Rose'was one of the major bestsellers of the 1980s-he has always primarily been a man of ideas...
...It is defended by its Padre and Captain Alejandro de la Vega, a hidalgo of ancient lineage who has come to the New World to make his fortune...
...Giambattista Bodoni, nicknamed "Yambo," is an antiquarian book dealer in Milan...
...In addition to his normal courses, Diego has studied with the great fencing master Manuel E scalante and has entered a secret society, La Justicia, where he first assumes the role of Zorro...
...Half of those Blacks died at sea...
...only poor campesinos worked, each of them providing food for 30 idlers...
...Everywhere the banality of popular culture is contrasted with the cruel realities of wartime...
...Emerging from his coma, Yambo fights his way through a mental fog that embodies itself in the fragments and quotations that crowd his brain...
...Mv name is Arthur Gordon Pvm...
...Zorro, as a real and often imperfect character, she does not always find it easy to handle the incidents when the plot veers from just credible to patently incredible...
...Finally I came to a vast chasm and could see a colossal figure, wrapped in a shroud, its face the immaculate whiteness of snow...
...The doctors call it "retrograde amnesia," but the loss is selective: While he can remember every line of poetry he ever learned, every historical event he experienced, every book he read, he has lost all his personal memories...
...To be intensely educated about the horror of sin and then to be conquered by it...
...Hokey as all this may sound, it is brought to life by Allende 's talent for atmosphere and color, her ability to express both beauty and misery with a sort of poetry...
...To an antiquarian book dealer, at least, it was clear what had happened, you had only to look at the first issue of a new series, dated 1942: It featured a large boldfaced notice explaining that William Cody's real name was Domenico Tombini and that he was from Romagna (just as Mussolini was, though the note passed over that amazing coincidence in modest silence...
...While some of the books' covers refer to Buffalo Bill, the Hero of the Plains, the inside headings say Buffalo Bill, the Italian Hero of the Plains...
...Alta California is still all-butvirgin territory, roamed by Shoshone and Chumash Indians...
...A bandstand had been built in the Plaza de Armas, and musicians enlivened the evening hour of the paseo when, under the watchful eyes of their parents, young promenaders, looking their very best, strolled around the plaza, the girls in one direction and the boys in another...
...Yambo looks for his past in the many piles of junk literature his grandfather had kept, especially the children's books, cartoons and pulp fiction of his childhood years...
...Like Potter's work, Eco 's novel is on one level a love letter to the pop culture he is holding up for examination...
...He never questioned the ideas he had inherited from his ancestors, even though sometimes they were not appropriate to the reality of America...
...it was one of the most truthful and understanding books ever written about the United States by an outsider...
...The natural setting is magnificent: "endless forests, a thousand varieties of animals and birds, streams and gentle slopes, the white sands of the beaches of the Pacific...
...Since his first appearance in the serialized novel The Curse of Capistrano, he has featured in 65 such tales, as well as several movies, including a couple of silent films...
...My Childrens Library, Buffalo Bill, Salgari 's The Black Corsair, Fantomas, Arsene Lupin, Rocambole, Sherlock Holmes...
...The odd but fruitful pairing of this rather serious novelist with the popular Latino hero, originally created in 1919 by the pulp writer Johnston McCulley, was the brainchild of the family that has owned the Zorro license for several generations and felt the masked adventurer was in need of "quality lit" treatment...
...Philosophically critical of it, he is also susceptible to its tawdry glamour, and he has richly and lovingly illustrated The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana with its relics: book covers, comic strip excerpts, sheet music, cartoons, advertisements...
...Even though a succession of inept monarchs was leading the empire into inevitable ruin, Alejandro had never questioned the divine legitimacy of the monarchy, just as he had never questioned the hierarchical order in which he had grown up or the absolute superiority of his race, his nation and his faith...
...territory...
...His skills come in handy now that he finds himself responsible for the two de Romeu daughters: the beautiful Juliana-with whom he is madly but hopelessly in love-and her lively younger sister Isabel...
...Legend of Zorro, another Banderas vehicle, is due for release at the end of this year...
...When Napoleon is eventually defeated and Ferdinand VII, "the Desired," is returned to the throne, de Romeu is thrown into jail...
...In fictional form, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Harcourt, 480 pp., $27.00) now does the same for his native Italy, a country with whose recent history he is far more intimately involved, and whose schizophrenia is just as pronounced, just as perverse, as America's...
...His love/hate response to his formation is as schizophrenic as the world he revisits...
...A thick, opaque fog, which enveloped the noises and called up shapeless phantoms...
...Zorro does not fully succeed as a novel-the characters are inevitably too one-dimensional-but it is delicious fun as narrative and often enlightening as history...
...Diego is sent to Barcelona to complete his education...
...The relatively realistic passages are the most effective ones, and in fact, plot and modern myth aside, the book works very well as a pure historical novel, giving the reader vivid images of familiar scenes-Los Angeles, Barcelona-as they were two centuries ago...
...Yambo wonders...
...I had not relived my own childhood so much as that of a generation," Yambo realizes...
...By 1942 we had, I felt sure, already entered the War with the United States, and that explained everything...
...twice), Tyrone Power, Alain Delon, Frank Langella, Antonio Banderas, and even George Hamilton (in a farce called Zorro, The Gay Blade...
...Die GO LIVES in the home of Tomas de Romeu, an old friend of his father's, a political liberal who supports the French occupation...
...In the former, the 'tight packers,' the captives were stacked like firewood, one atop another, bound with chains and covered in their own excrement and vomit, healthy mixed with sick, dying and dead...
...Trying to denote the personal within the collective is at first impossible, and Eco conveys Yambo's befuddlement with skill...
...The overgrazing by the European settlers' cattle has not yet stripped the green hills of their vegetation and turned the land to desert...
...Allende, who in 10 novels and three memoirs has demonstrated her skill with both magic realism and just plain realism, turns out to be perfectly suited to this material...
...We were going to war against the United States and our papers were celebrating the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the airwaves were bringing us 'beneath Hawaiian skies you'll watch the full moon rise and dream of paradise.' (But perhaps the listening audience was not aware that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii or that Hawaii was a U.S...
...Fleeing from the dastardly Rafael Moncada, who is determined to marry Juliana, the threesome, along with the girls' middle-aged chaperone, crosses Spain disguised first as pilgrims on the Santiago de Compostela trail, then as gypsies in a large caravan...
...Here is Los Angeles at the turn of the 19th century: "The town now had a bullring, a brand new brothel staffed by three half-Mexican girls of negotiable virtue, and an opulent mulatto from Panama, whose price was fixed and not cheap...
...After floundering for a while, Yambo sets off on a personal search for himself, back to his family's old country house at Solana, in the hills between Milan and Turin, that had belonged to his grandfather...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
