Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco (review)

cabaretiers Baliev and Evreinov, Segel reminds us that the history of Russian theatre doesn't begin and end with the Art Theatre. Segel's book disappoints only in those chapters where he re-maps familiar ground. His description of the Chat Noir adds little more than program excerpts to the illuminating work of Jerrold Seigel. Munich's Eleven Executioners and Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire have likewise been the subject of studies more comprehensive and sophisticated than Segel's. These sections also suffer from insufficient attention to context-criticism more formalistic than Segel displays in his Eastern European chapters, where his grasp of theatre history and social politics fuels his understanding of cabaret. Most irritating-and easiest to avoid-is the lack of forceful editing throughout the book. Too much circular analysis, repetitionand flat writing mar what is otherwise a valuable addition to performance scholarship . Marc Robinson Travels in Hyperreality Umberto Eco Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 236 pp.; $15.95 (cloth) Eco, as well known for his fiction as for his work in semiotics and readerresponse criticism, reveals himself here to be equally gifted in the art of the popular essay. Most of these twenty-six pieces first appeared in Italian newspapers and magazines between 1967 and 1984, and they demonstrate not only the diversity of Eco's thought but also his range as a writer. "Hyperreality" is the landscape of American fantasy. It is also an attitude, a way of life, and an ideology. Eco meticulously picks apart places like Graceland, Disneyland, the Getty Museum, and San Simeon-self-made monuments of media-made men-but he also dissects numerous less famous follies: obscure wax museums, re-creations of the Last Supper, the Madonna Inn, and Spongeorama. Eco is extremely adept at sorting out the peculiarities of popular culture, and he does so as a wryly omniscient observer, commenting wittily on our typically American quirks. The real strength of the collection lies in Eco's ability to balance observation and anecdote with theory. "Travels" is not only a fantastic travelogue; it is a treatise on America's multiple, often competing realities. Our taste for perfect copies and absolute fakes, Eco argues, accustoms us to the planned obsolescence and illusory usefulness of both consumer goods and political ideologies. As he examines a culture where entrepreneurs like Ralph Lauren seduce the public with hyperrealities of the rich and Aryan, where former movie stars, evangelists and faith healers wield political strength, Eco exposes a hunger for artifice at the expense of reality itself. In "A Photograph" Eco makes a statement that accurately conveys the 95 philosophy behind all his essays. "Understanding the mechanisms of the symbolic in which we move means being political. Not understanding them leads to mistaken politics." And, we might add, mistaken politics leads to amoral and tyrannical worlds or, worse, deluded ones. Travels in Hyperreality marks Eco's attempt to avoid that fate. His is a trip worth taking, and a good read, too. Jordan Tamagni Content's Dreams: Essays 1975-1984 Charles Bernstein Sun and Moon Press; 465 pp.; $11.95 (paper) It is one of the scandals of our literary culture that the so-called "language" writers have been so scrupulously ignored by virtually all establishment editors, pundits, critics, and upholders of public taste. Charles Bernstein must be accounted a major literary theorist of his generation, but don't expect to find his articles in The New York Times or his poetry in The New Yorker. These essays range over a wide number of topics: the idea of representation , the fallacy of value-free, "objective" prose, canons of good taste, and such contemporary artists and writers as Arakawa, Louis Zukofsky, and Clark Coolidge. Throughout the collection, Bernstein offers a multivalent analysis of the various kinds of political discourse of our time. Bernstein's ideas are critical for any worker in the theatre because they assume language as act, as gesture, within the realm of performance. Bernstein sees performance as an everyday cultural phenomenon, as the field of a pervasive theatricalization that serves the interests of a deeply layered and politically repressive system. In a very real sense the "language" movement constitutes a spirited attack on all orders of...